2011 Japanese earthquakes and tsunami, one year on.

vibe666

it will be a year ago this Sunday that the earthquakes and tsunami that devastated a large portion of Japan on March 11th 2011, so I thought it might be a good time to have a look at how the people of Japan are recovering a year on.

There's a piece on boston.com showing images from directly after the tsunami and from the same vantage points almost 1 year on.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/03/japan_tsunami_pictures_before.html

I'm hopefully optimistic that this thread can avoid turning into another round of the pro/anti nuclear bun fight from the last thread and focus on how Japan is doing now and the good (and bad) human interest stories that have come about after what happened.

Mr Benevolent

All I can think is that Ireland would still be a pile of smoking rubble today if that happened here.

bijapos

I spoke to a Japanese woman after Christmas and she asked me how the Irish would react. I reckoned that most people would help each other but this would be overshadowed by a massive land and wealth grab by a few people with influence. Some areas would be spotless, others just festering in the rubble of the Tsunami.

Last couple of pics are somehow the most poignant. Fair play to the Japanese though, they still have a way to go but they have achieved an enormous amount..

I just read this morning on RSOE. I had never heard that radiation reached us so soon.

''Radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear reactor accident in Japan reached Ireland in the weeks after the event. It arrived at such low levels, however, that it had no significance for either public health or food safety, according to a report on the incident from the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland. “The levels that we have detected were very low,” Dr Ciara McMahon, the institute’s director of environmental surveillance and assessment, said yesterday. “There was no health hazard, but the incident provided a useful test of our equipment.” She said the institute maintained 14 permanent radioactivity monitoring stations across the country.'

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=HZ-20120309-34453-IRL

vibe666

quite a stark comparison to New Orleans after Katrina hit in 2005. the Americans are still arguing over who is responsible for what happened there, never mind actually fixing it.

all this time and until last month there were still families living in FEMA trailers in new orleans. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/02/last-katrina-trailer-finally-leaves-new-orleans/1253/

i'm sure there are still a lot of Japanese people displaced at the moment and there is still a lot of rebuilding to be done, but you'd imagine at the current rate of rebuilding, in 5 years time in Japan you'd never even know it had happened from looking at it, unlike New Orleans which still has large areas that are completely destroyed sitting in a similar state to what they were directly after Katrina.