Gabriel Arrarás / News Director
A panel of multidisciplinary experts came together March 23 to discuss the catastrophic events in Japan and the country’s road to recovery.
Hosted by the School of International and Public Affairs and co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the Japan teach-in was held in the Graham Center Ballrooms at the Modesto Maidique Campus.
First panelist to speak was Professor Dean Whitman of the Department of Earth and Environment, who provided audience members with a look at the magnitude 9.0 earthquake which struck off the Northeast coast of Japan. One aspect Whitman found interesting was the 7.2 foreshock which preceded the 9.0 quake on March 9.
“Not all earthquakes are preceded by foreshocks, so it can’t be used as a way to predict earthquakes,” Whitman told a nearly full crowd at the GC Ballrooms.
The 9.0 earthquake which struck the Tōhoko region of Japan, is the fourth largest earthquake in recorded history, which spans from 1906 until present. The largest earthquake on record was the 9.2 magnitude Chile earthquake, followed by the 9.2 magnitude earthquake which struck Alaska in 1964.
Whitman refers to these three earthquakes, and the two others which exceed 9.0 magnitudes as the “major workhorses of geologic work on the earth.”
“Those five earthquakes of magnitude 9.0 or greater constitute over one half of all seismic energy released that has occurred over those 100 years,” said Whitman.
According to Whitman, Japan is no stranger to earthquakes, having experienced 27 different events of magnitude 7.5 or greater. Whitman also spoke about the aftershocks affecting Japan since the March 11 earthquake. Since the earthquake, there have been over 600 aftershocks, some exceeding over 4.5 in magnitude.
As of the latest estimates made by Japan’s national police, over 8,649 people across eighteen prefectures have been confirmed dead. Police officials also said they had still not accounted for around 13,262 people, many of which they fear to be dead.
Speaking on the human casualties of the disaster was Professor Richard Olson of the Department of Politics and International relations, who braced his audience by telling them to fasten their seatbelts because “this is going to be a bumpy ride.”
Olson began by asking the audience to think about the vulnerabilities from natural events that were not noticed in the 1900s, saying that they would “sure as hell be noticed in 2011 and beyond.”
From his perspective, a big challenge to making countries “life-safe” is the increase in global population levels from the year 1900 to 2010. In 1900, the global population was at around two billion people mostly living in rural areas.
By 2010, the world’s population is around seven billion people, a majority of whom live in urban areas.
“This is a century in which we have started to pay the price for what we did in the last hundred years,” said Olson, who looks at numbers of casualties in terms of the population of the principal zones of impact.
Olson began with the example of Haiti, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake which struck the island on Jan. 12, 2010. Over 240,000 people died, making it around 8% of the primary zone of impact’s population – a figure that Olson calls “obscene.”
He also discussed the magnitude 8.8 earthquake which struck Chile on Feb. 27, 2010, killing around 560 people. This casualty figure comes out to less than 0.2% of the population of the primary zone of impact, Concepcion.
“Hard to say [but] I call this a win,” said Olson, referring to the relatively small loss of life.
Olson calls the catastrophe in Japan the first compound disaster — a disaster with more than two components. This is a type of disaster that Olson believes the world needs to start thinking about more.
“There are tremendous human vulnerabilities all around the world,” said Olson, highlighting a slide in his presentation which showed six different cities, each of which have increased population by 1,000 percent over the last 50 years.
These included: Lima-Callao, Peru; Istanbul, Turkey; Tehran, Iran; and Caracas, Venezuela.
“If you look at our vulnerability creation, for a natural event one hundred to two hundred years is an infinite decimal drop in the pool of time. But human thinking considers one hundred to two hundred years to be a very long time,” said Olson. “Nature operates at her own time schedule. What we’ve done in the last hundred and fifty years is going to set up what we’re going to experience in the next or current century.”
Giving a cold look at what major losses could look like in the future and what countries should set as goals to make the rest of the century a “bit less traumatic,” Olson outlined some figures.
He would expect countries to aim for no less than one percent of PZI population killed, no more than three percent of PZI population injured, no more than five percent of PZI families homeless, no more than five percent critical facilities inoperable after 24 hours and no more than five percent infrastructure inoperable after day seven in the PZI.
According to Pallab Mozumder, associate professor of the Department of Earth and Enviroment and the Department of Economics, the last major earthquake killed 6,400 people and caused $100 billion damage.
The estimated damage for the current crisis is projected to be in close to $300 billion, almost two percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.
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