Disasters and people and hope

[bktheirregular]

Sometimes, to paraphrase Dr. Sam Beckett, you have to start the story at the end.

honorh is okay. She was living and working on the northern Japanese Pacific coast, right in the path of the tsunami, but her family's gotten word that she's alive and okay, having gotten clear before the water hit, apparently.

Adding up the numbers, the quake happened exactly nine years and six months after a certain act of mass murder and carnage in lower Manhattan. Granted, that wasn't on nearly as massive a scale, but...

...let me explain. I was in law school at the time, taking evening classes with a bunch of people who worked for a living during the day (and a few who stayed home to care for families, but they're not the ones I mean at the moment). A number of those people worked on and around Wall Street, several within spitting distance of Ground Zero. It wasn't just a pair of towering office buildings that got destroyed that morning; communications, transportation, quite a bit of infrastructure got taken down as well. And as far as communications, what wasn't damaged or destroyed got overloaded to the breaking point and beyond.

One person I knew and cared about was near Ground Zero, and didn't answer phones or any other means of communication. It took a day and a half to hear from her.

And this was a relatively localized disaster. The effect of the quake on Japan is much more generalized.

Still, there were things saying "don't lose hope". The images of the water hitting Kamaishi showed a city that looked largely deserted; one report said that there had been an hour's warning between the quake and the tsunami; honorh reported a quake (in hindsight, a pre-shock) and tsunami warning a couple of days earlier, so it was a good guess that people were primed for any need to evacuate; and given the havoc that the wave would play with power and communications, not hearing anything from someone doesn't mean jack at this point.

Until you hear, of course.

Thankfully, given warning (pre-shocks), common sense (very much in evidence), the time of day (half past 2 in the afternoon), and a boat-load of national preparedness, one person's story has a comparatively happy ending.

Let's hope that the majority of stories along the Japanese Pacific coast end the same way.

Comments

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

I'm glad your friend is okay! :) And yeah, the comms infrastructure collapsing is a big problem for everyone in any major disaster (it took me 2 days to hear from friends in LI in 2001). They've been pointing out the chaotic nature of everything on the BBC coverage, and have even shown some rescues at sea. So...it's too early to give up all hope.

[weirdweb.livejournal.com]

Thank God she's okay. Thanks for posting the update.