Tsunami: When fact is scarier than fiction

THE TRAGEDIES that have recently befallen the globe should remind us of the fragility of the world we know, the links that bind us to places distant and remote, and the need to respect nature’s power and its wrath.

An earthquake in New Zealand toward the end of February. Political upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain. And now the biggest of them all, the earthquake, tsunami and explosions in a nuclear power plant in Japan. The political unrest in the Arab world is obviously man-made and, though far away, we feel the pain and anxiety when we evacuate our OFWs based there, commiserate with those who are trapped and stranded, and empathize with those who choose to stay and dare the fates, they who would prefer the uncertainties of war in an alien land to the certainty of poverty in the homeland.

The earth’s upheaval in New Zealand and Japan, and the devastating tsunami that hit northern Japan, are not man-made. Earthquakes cannot be predicted or averted, and the apt response is to prepare for when they strike. The tsunamis—given the scale of the 30-foot wall of water crashing down on the shore and venturing one-kilometer inland in Japan—seem beyond human power to contain or control.

Significantly, both countries are wealthy, with well-organized governments and civil societies. With regard to Japan, I have come across articles and blogs wondering: What aid can we give to an aid-giving state like Japan? The calm and equanimity with which the Japanese people have responded to the crisis are admirable. I contrast this to the sheer chaos we encountered when “Ondoy” hit us in September 2009 and, for a few days, it was as if we were a nation without a government. Apart from individual acts of heroism and pockets of community-organized aid, we were basically left to fend for ourselves, as it were, in a Hobbesian state of nature. We Filipinos of course are wont to blame our inept and corrupt government. Looking at the total devastation left behind by the tsunami, we should learn a thing or two from how the Japanese people, on their own, have organized themselves in makeshift houses in relocation sites, amid a freezing winter, facing a shortage of food supplies and lacking something as basic as clean water.

But what is clearly man-made and man-controlled is the threat coming from the explosions that hit a nuclear power station, disabling the cooling systems that, if we go by the nightmare at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, and Chernobyl in Russia in 1986, can cause a meltdown of the nuclear fuel. And here we are on familiar ground.

One, the Japanese public and Japan’s neighboring countries, which should include the Philippines in this instance, are entitled to full and accurate information about the threat from the disabled nuclear power plants. The experience in the past—and here I recall the suppression of news in the Chernobyl meltdown and in China during the SARS epidemic—is that news blackouts or manipulation do not help. The problem only gets bigger while the truth is hidden from the public, and the truth inevitably comes out anyway but a little too late.

Two, we all need more education on nuclear power. It is not enough that our Constitution “adopts and pursues a policy of freedom from nuclear weapons in its territory.” It is not enough that we have mothballed the Marcos-era, tainted Bataan Nuclear Power Plant built by Westinghouse. If governments have a duty to disclose information to the public, the public ought to be educated enough to understand that information. We had a good scare the other day caused by texted warnings of a coming Armageddon. That was good news for Mercury Drugstore and its sales of Betadine, but it exposed a public both gullible and panicky.

But I wonder if the public, even if it had been given scientifically based warnings of nuclear contagion, would have been in a position to use that information wisely and prudently. Indeed, news blackouts have been justified by this fear of causing public panic, and the best argument against the blackout is the assurance of a subdued and rational public—come to think of it, as sober as many of the Japanese I have seen interviewed on foreign TV.

And three, disaster preparedness shouldn’t be the duty of government alone. Just like Japan, the Philippines is an archipelago. Just like Japan, we are geologically vulnerable to earthquakes. Just like Japan, we have thousands of miles of coastline exposed to the onslaught of a tsunami. But unlike Japan, we have a history of both a bungling state and a fragmented civil society. Back to the Hobbesian metaphor, it is each man for himself, and even the state—the embodiment of the communal interest—we have perverted and enlisted for private gain.

Sure it is the duty of government to help us deal with such emergencies, and we must continue with what bureaucrats call disaster-preparedness. But look at “Ondoy.” No disaster-preparedness program could have prepared us for that one. God forbid if a tsunami of the scale we saw in Japan would ever hit us, but I can’t imagine any government program—especially since we are obviously not rich like Japan—that can cope with a disaster of that magnitude. We must turn instead to organized civil society to marshal our strength.

Recall the big earthquake of July 1990, the Mount Pinatubo eruption of July 1991, and typhoon “Ondoy” of September 2009. This is not to absolve government and let it abdicate its responsibilities, but even the rich government of Japan had to rely on the energy, initiative and imagination of a self-empowered citizenry.

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