1) Shortages in Fukushima, etc, are not caused by lack of food or money. Japan has plenty of food and money. Japan has a temporary logistics problem with getting food to particular refugee sites, because of a number of issues, most critically that the infrastructure for delivering gas in the east got a severe monkey-wrench thrown into it and it is difficult to truck in enough to do distribution. With specific reference to Fukushima, the widening of the exclusion zone caused refugees to have to be moved twice is as many days, which also caused some issues.
The three closest ports for receiving refined gas got shut down by the tsunami (along with most local refinery capacity), so it has been getting transported by road from the other side of the country, and that has been hampered by damage to certain roads. One of those ports will be brought online today. As that situation gets better, the shortage of supplies for refugees will ease very rapidly. They're working very hard on that right now. Aid will not speed that process: any charity chosen at random is not better at doing gas delivery than Japanese gas companies, and no part of the relief efforts is blocking on lack of money.
2) Panic is not helping anyone, and foreign panic is feedback looping right now, particularly in the foreign communities. The only reason I have talked to the media at all is to stress the importance of them not panicking and not provoking panic.
3) I respect enormously people's desire to help, but satisfying desire to help is a very different thing from actually helping. The second is very important, the first not so much.
I was on a program on the BBC the other day. Another guest was a foreign aid worker from an organization I will not name. Host: "Where are you?" Him: "Not quite sure, north of Tokyo. The map is in Japanese." When asked about their plans for doing counseling, he said that they would find somebody locally who speaks English, because in his experience at X disasters across the world there is always somebody, and do counseling through the interpreter. One could be forgiven for difficulty in finding the value of his organization's assistance at the moment.
The US military's response has been invaluable -- choppers are very helpful right now, and have been saving lives. If you don't come packing your own distribution network designed to function parallel to the civilian ones, your ability to convert any amount of desire into hot meals at a school in eastern Japan is very limited right now.
After the immediate situation is addressed, Miyagi, Iwate, and the like will have large reconstruction efforts. Japan has the political will and resources to handle this.
A note: It is a very fluid situation. My blog post was written on Sunday, 3.5 days ago. The NYT asked me for a condensed version 2.5 days ago. Please keep in mind, when you're hearing from anybody (including me), you're hearing something which was true X amount of time ago in a situation evolving very rapidly.
Thank you for the unbelievably sane perspective on disaster relief.
For anyone that is motivated to give charitable dollars by this disaster, consider that there is likely a more efficient charity as far as maximizing lives saved per dollar, such as Village Reach. http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villager...
Randomly jumping on a flight into Japan to wander around asking people in English if they need help is obviously stupid. But that's not just stupid for Japan, that's stupid for pretty much everywhere. Pointing out its stupidity isn't useful - people who would do that aren't listening to you anyways - so why conflate that sort of behavior with simple, non-disruptive, non-panic-inducing actions like donating money to the Red Cross? Or why contrast it with requests like "send nuclear expertise and helicopters", which everyone who meaningfully could and would is already doing?
After Katrina, Japan donated $200k to the US Red Cross, made $1m worth of supplies available, and private donations from Japanese companies and individuals went over $13m. The US certainly wasn't short of food or money, so why did they bother?
A $50 donation to the Red Cross will potentially help. Earmark it for their general fund, and if they really don't need it for Japan, they'll spend it somewhere else. This is such a bizarre thing to have to defend.
"Spend it somewhere else" was exactly what I wrote in my blog post, but when the New York Times says "We can give you three hundred words" then Priority #1 is "Don't Panic" and Priority #Left_On_Cutting_Room_Floor is explaining to people how relief organizations actually operate.
"Everything you actually could do is worthless to us, but please send all possible help for this scary thing that you don't understand and can't possibly actually assist with" is the opposite of "Don't Panic". It conveys helplessness and disempowers your readers.
That's the opposite of how I read that. I take it as a comfort that they're doing their best, and they're the best at what they're doing. If they needed food or money, I would gladly send it, but he's saying they don't. Great!
Even though Japan has enough resources, to borrow a phrase from Alan Kay, help is there but it is unevenly distributed.
When Brisbane got flooded earlier this year, there were a lot of friends and strangers who came around and volunteered their time to help my parents clean up. There were also people who volunteered their weekends to clean up street by street. Some people donated buses to ferry volunteers around, others trucks to carry waste to the dump.
One guy made sandwiches and gave them out to everyone on the street until power came back on about a week later.
The biggest problems a couple of weeks post-flood faced were:
1. electricity
2. heating
3. food refrigeration
4. cooking equipment
5. washing clothes
The minor ones were:
1. table for eating, writing
2. boxes to store clothes
Even if people are insured, insurance claims took about 8 weeks. (I just got my cheque last week for some minor flood damage). Then there is the long wait for builders to get started.
In the meantime, the supply chain is completely broken. Bakers don't have flour, people don't have work. Survivors are idle and need work to take their mind off their predicament, but these people will need to be organised and mobilized.
For areas that are not affected by flood, it was still another month before milk started reappearing on shelfs. I remembered that vegetables were difficult to come by, and my parents were thinking of making bean sprouts.
Even though I'm sure Japan can stand on its own, it is nice to have people help out because it helps you to realize you are not on your own, and a lot of people care about you.
"Please keep in mind, when you're hearing from anybody (including me), you're hearing something which was true X amount of time ago in a situation evolving very rapidly."
Under these conditions I think it's better to just refer people to the good/right sources of information. Everyone wanting there 15 minutes by jumping to conclusions seem to be a big part of the problem.
Please post this as a reply on the blog too! This has much more detail & sense than the original blog post.
And even in India, after the Tsunami, the problem was not so much as having aid/materials, as having the transport to get the materials to the right place, and building temporary accommodation fast enough for the displaced people.
"satisfying desire to help is a very different thing from actually helping"
..reminds me of the Israel/Territories human disaster where any help is actually a hindrance because one side basically doesn't accept the other side's existence to begin with. Thus, (to me) the apparent problems are not the real problems.
Natural disaster relief is straightforward: you're helping or you're not. Unlike the Israel/Territories disaster, the end points are agreeable with a fairly clear path apparent: evacuation, medical, life-support, clearance, reconstruction, learning/prevention. Humans can do this, but also trying to win or avert a war at the same time is a lot harder. Any tips?
1) Shortages in Fukushima, etc, are not caused by lack of food or money. Japan has plenty of food and money. Japan has a temporary logistics problem with getting food to particular refugee sites, because of a number of issues, most critically that the infrastructure for delivering gas in the east got a severe monkey-wrench thrown into it and it is difficult to truck in enough to do distribution. With specific reference to Fukushima, the widening of the exclusion zone caused refugees to have to be moved twice is as many days, which also caused some issues.
The three closest ports for receiving refined gas got shut down by the tsunami (along with most local refinery capacity), so it has been getting transported by road from the other side of the country, and that has been hampered by damage to certain roads. One of those ports will be brought online today. As that situation gets better, the shortage of supplies for refugees will ease very rapidly. They're working very hard on that right now. Aid will not speed that process: any charity chosen at random is not better at doing gas delivery than Japanese gas companies, and no part of the relief efforts is blocking on lack of money.
2) Panic is not helping anyone, and foreign panic is feedback looping right now, particularly in the foreign communities. The only reason I have talked to the media at all is to stress the importance of them not panicking and not provoking panic.
3) I respect enormously people's desire to help, but satisfying desire to help is a very different thing from actually helping. The second is very important, the first not so much.
I was on a program on the BBC the other day. Another guest was a foreign aid worker from an organization I will not name. Host: "Where are you?" Him: "Not quite sure, north of Tokyo. The map is in Japanese." When asked about their plans for doing counseling, he said that they would find somebody locally who speaks English, because in his experience at X disasters across the world there is always somebody, and do counseling through the interpreter. One could be forgiven for difficulty in finding the value of his organization's assistance at the moment.
The US military's response has been invaluable -- choppers are very helpful right now, and have been saving lives. If you don't come packing your own distribution network designed to function parallel to the civilian ones, your ability to convert any amount of desire into hot meals at a school in eastern Japan is very limited right now.
After the immediate situation is addressed, Miyagi, Iwate, and the like will have large reconstruction efforts. Japan has the political will and resources to handle this.
A note: It is a very fluid situation. My blog post was written on Sunday, 3.5 days ago. The NYT asked me for a condensed version 2.5 days ago. Please keep in mind, when you're hearing from anybody (including me), you're hearing something which was true X amount of time ago in a situation evolving very rapidly.