4 years after Japan disaster, more than 200 seawalls exist only on paper

[bananas]

Source: Yomiuri Shimbun

With Wednesday marking the fourth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, construction of almost 40 percent of seawalls planned in the three prefectures most severely hit by the disaster — Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima — has not even begun.

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The central government, the three prefectures and coastal municipalities, as the main construction entities, planned seawalls at 537 locations stretching about 400 kilometers. Construction costs are estimated at $8.2 billion.

Only 46 of 573, or 8 percent, have been built, while 316, or 55 percent, are still under construction, and the remaining 211, or 37 percent, have seen no construction.

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The three prefectures initially aimed at having all seawall construction completed within fiscal 2015, but they now predict completion to be in fiscal 2018 or later following a series of changes in the plans due to construction delays.

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Read more: http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/4-years-after-japan-disaster-more-than-200-seawalls-exist-only-on-paper-1.333869

[Orrex]

1. Golly, that origami stuff is amazing.

[father founding]

2. How do they do it

When did the US congress start making laws in Japan ?

[Fred Friendlier]

3. Come on people, this is a big deal

That tsunami killed almost twenty thousand people, and if the Japanese don't get it together and put up those seawalls the next tsunami might kill another twenty thousand.

[FBaggins]

4. Underneath is all is a calculation that politicians hate to make public

If an event in your neighborhood kills one of your neighbors, what amount of money is appropriate to spend to prevent the next death?

Let's say you have overhead power lines and one of them breaks in "the storm of the millennium" and kills a neighbor. Is it appropriate for the government to spend $400,000 to bury all of the power lines in your neighborhood to prevent the next death? Nobody wants to put a dollar amount on a human life, but there's always the consideration...

How likely is the next "storm of the millennium" if this was the worst storm in history and the overhead lines have weathered all previous storms?

What's the opportunity lost by spending that $400,000. What if it could save two lives for half as much by putting up two traffic lights at the entrance to the neighborhood and now those funds are going to burying the cables.

Are there alternatives? After all, in this case you usually have quite a bit of warning that the power line is going to break. Can you improve your early warning and/or your evacuation training for much less?

What other impacts will the buried power lines have? Positive or negative?

In short, governments often make snap decisions in the wake of a disaster that they don't even necessarily expect will ever come to pass.

Lastly... let's give the people of Japan some credit. As much as I wailed at the time that people here were focusing so much attention on radiation that was unlikely to kill very many people (while hardly even discussing the tens of thousands of dead and missing from the earthquake and tsunami)... it's also important to point out that a 2004 earthquake off Indonesia and another in 2010 in Haiti killed hundreds of thousands of people. The difference is because Japan actually does a very good job at these things. There is no amount of money that can be spent to ensure that Mother Nature wins no battles.

[lonestarnot]

5. Yep.

All decisions are economically based.

[Fred Friendlier]

6. Outstanding

I come from a chemistry background so I think in terms of Euler Coefficients and Chemical Potentials, which are equal when the system is in equilibrium. We can't achieve on a macro scale but we can at least try balance the competing demands so it is approximately true: try not to focus the time and effort and money on a twenty million dollar project that might save one house when a million dollars elsewhere might save an entire neighborhood.

A lot of this is judgment calls, and you are absolutely correct that we put a tacit value on life all the time - with some lives valued more highly than others. Then there is the bureaucratic reality that precautions not finished in 2015 may never be finished at all, as they get overtaken by new and more exciting concerns.