Saturday, September 10, 2005
Benchmarking American disaster relief
Todd Crowell, who writes the always-interesting Asia Cable blog, compares the American performance following Katrina to the Japanese relief of Kobe following its catastrophe earthquake of 1995. The Kobe quake was not unlike Katrina in its destructive power, both in human lives (perhaps worse) and economic consequences. Nevertheless, a usually competent government in an advanced and wealthy country reacted ineptly, notwithstanding national sensitivity to the risk of earthquakes.
However inept our response may have been (skirting, for this post at least, the question of which level of government was the least, er, ept), we probably weren't any more screwed up than the Japanese, who didn't even have looting to contend with. Read it all.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it is tempting to make comparisons with the tsunami that devastated the coasts of Sumatra and Sri Lanka less than one year ago. Yet fearsome as the death toll was, the disaster hit what was basically an economic backwater.
A better comparison would be Kobe, like New Orleans a modern, industrialized city and an important port with a population of about 1.5 million Kobe that is about three times larger than New Orleans. Now that ten years have passed since the January 17, 1995 earthquake, it provides a good example of what to expect.
Japan prides itself being prepared for earthquakes, which are common throughout the archipelago (though not so much in the Kansai area surrounding Kobe). Japan spends a fortune on trying to predict coming quakes. Every year on Sept. 1 (anniversary of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake) the country holds earthquake drills.
Yet the authorities were caught completely flat-footed when a 7.2 scale earthquake struck. The quake killed 6,433 people, injured about 40,000 and made 300,000 people homeless, some of them for years. Economic losses exceeded $100 billion, or fully two percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.
The government’s response was sluggish and confused. It took Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama nearly 24 hours to decide whether to dispatch troops to Kobe (though looting was fairly low). No clear lines of authority for disaster relief had been established that would permit an effective response.
However inept our response may have been (skirting, for this post at least, the question of which level of government was the least, er, ept), we probably weren't any more screwed up than the Japanese, who didn't even have looting to contend with. Read it all.
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