Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant in Japan has a lot of people reexamining nuclear power as a generation method. In Europe in particular, people are taking a very close look at whether continuing or expanding nuclear power generation is a good idea. If what is happening in Japan is what one can expect from nuclear power, the argument goes, we need to find some alternate sources of energy.

So let's take a look. As it turns out, if you compare the various ways you can generate power and the fatalities associated with that method -- including those due to workplace accidents, but also including those due to environmental damage (like a nuclear accident) -- the range is vast. In fact, the most lethal method of power generation has more than 4,000 times as many deaths attributed to it per terawatt hour generated as the least lethal one, and about 4.5 times as many as the second most lethal method.

It would make quite a bit of sense, given the statistics, for countries to take a good, long, hard look at this deadly form of power, and start now to take steps to eliminate it. In fact, looking at the numbers, you might expect that there would be a major initiative to shift from the most lethal to the least lethal form of power generation, which would be in everybody's best interests.

As it turns out, that's exactly what had been happening before the Japanese earthquake. You see, the most lethal way to generate electricity, as it turns out, is from coal, which accounts for about 50% of the world's electricity generation right now and causes 161 deaths per terawatt hour generated. In addition to the deaths attributable to pollution and global warming, coal generation requires coal mining, one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.

So, before the earthquake, many countries were looking at switching more generation over to a much less deadly form of power generation. As it turns out, the lowest fatality rate per terawatt hour in the world is nuclear power, with just 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour, even taking into account the Chernobyl disaster and other smaller incidents. Even wind energy has more than 4 times this death rate -- caused by turbine blades flying off and workers falling from turbines.

So why are we so upset about nuclear power right now? Why can we muster opposition to even continuing to use the plants we have, let alone building new ones, but nowhere near the push to switch from coal to something -- anything -- else?

First of all, deaths related to coal generation are often invisible. When people die early because of respiratory problems, it doesn't make the news as being "coal-related." These deaths are spread out around the world, and the connection to electricity generation is not terribly obvious. Even when miners die in a mine collapse and it does get a lot of attention, this is generally seen as relating to mine safety, not to power generation. It's much easier to blame mine owners than it is to blame ourselves for using so much power in the first place or tolerating coal-burning plants.

With nuclear power, on the other hand, accidents are big news. This is in part because they really are very rare, but also because the environmental damage is much greater for a small pollution incident. Think about it. If we paid the kind of attention to a tiny seepage of coal smog that we are to the problems at Fukushima, we'd do nothing but talk about coal plants all day long. Unlike coal, which releases a continuous stream of pollutants into the air all the time, the release of nuclear material is much more unusual and much more deadly.

And that's the problem. We don't tend to react to overall averages when we think about deaths and risks. We react to what's going on right now. If every nuclear power plant released radiation the way the Fukushima plant is doing now, and they did it day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would really be catastrophic. The thing we're missing when we say that because of this accident nuclear is too dangerous is that, in fact, every nuclear plant doesn't do that, and even at worst they won't.

Does that mean there's nothing to learn here? Of course not. The safer nuclear plants can be made, the better. Same goes for reducing pollution from coal and making mines safer. And if we can figure out a way to generate power that never kills anyone, I'm all for it. But if we're going to make energy policy, maybe we should consider making it based on the complete facts, and not just what we're scared of today.

The attention of most of the country continues to be across the Pacific in Japan. The loss of life is horrific. The material damage is enormous. The fear regarding the radiation in Fukushima is mounting.

Now is not the time for a psychological crisis intervention in Japan. The situation is still unfolding, and there are still significant basic physical and safety needs to be met. The best that can be done from a mental health standpoint in Japan right now is managing people's fear. Both the Prime Minister and the Emperor appear, from this vantage point, to be doing a pretty good job at exercising resilient leadership. The consistent emphasis on coming together and getting through this is good practice.

What about folks in the U.S.? Is there anything we can or should be doing for people here? I think there is.

First of all, everyone in the world needs some decent information about the radiation risk. With the exception of nuclear scientists, most of us have very little understanding of how much radiation is too much, how the current accident will affect people in Japan and whether it will affect anyone anywhere else at all. The news media is doing a somewhat better job of bringing in experts to explain this to us, but I think it would help if they acknowledged that none of us like hearing that there's any radiation at all, and that the biggest impact here is from fear, not nuclear byproducts.

People here who have family and close friends in Japan, particularly in the area where the quake and tsunami were, need something a little more. I think you could further separate that group into two -- those who come from Japan and have roots there, and those who don't trace their roots to Japan but have family studying or visiting there. Last Friday was ghastly for both of these groups, and it would not be surprising if they're feeling the affects even now, presuming that they now know how their loved ones fared in the quake.

For those who come from Japan, this incident is not, in some ways, over. The pictures the rest of us see and think are horrible are more personal. They may have lost homes or other special places. They may not be ready, yet, to process through their feelings and try to put them away.

For those who had family visiting or living in Japan but are not themselves Japanese, the incident is largely over and they are probably ready for some intervention. It would be totally understandable if they are having some issues with feeling irritable, having trouble concentrating, not sleeping well or having intrusive thoughts about the quake and the agonizing wait to hear from loved ones. They need to know they're normal -- it's the situation that isn't.

Then there is that group that is somewhere in a no man's land in between. They are from Japan, every picture is personal, the situation is ongoing, and they also experienced the traumatic death of someone they love. For them, some understanding and moral support is in order until the dust can settle a little more and they can start to come to terms with all of this.

I wrote yesterday about my son's friend, Taro. When I wrote, I wasn't sure which category Taro fell into. Late yesterday we confirmed that he is in this last category. He lost his grandmother and his home. The only bright side, perhaps, is that young children don't really understand death and loss as permanent things. But his family does, like so many other families in Japan, here and elsewhere. The latest estimate I've heard is 10,000 dead. That's a lot of people in limbo, waiting for this to be over so they can grieve.

As many of you know, I have a 5-year-old son. As you may also know, I believe strongly in talking to children about traumatic events if they affect your family, if they are going to hear about them from somewhere else, or if you are very affected by them. Since my husband, my 12-year-old and I are talking a lot about Japan and it is all over the news, I have been talking to my 5-year-old as well. This seemed especially important since he has a little friend in his kindergarten class whose family is from Japan. I'll call him Taro.

My son knows about earthquakes. He heard about the one in Haiti, and that learning was reinforced when I went to Haiti to do some intervention work with kids last summer. His class also recently learned a little about plate tectonics, and his science fair project involved modeling how mountains form using sheets of lard floating in a pan of water. So we had a starting place.

On Friday, I explained that there had been a very huge earthquake in Japan. He immediately exclaimed, "Taro comes from Japan!" He was happy about this -- he had a personal connection to a grownup thing. That's a big deal when you're five. We then talked about tsunamis, which he has also heard of from a children's book called The Magic Fan in which the hero saves the town from a tsunami because he has built a giant bridge over the village. We talked about how the earthquake starts a big wave, and how, just like water sloshing in the tub, it sloshes one way and then sloshes the other. In this case, it sloshed all the way to Hawaii and California.

Interestingly, my son seemed to completely miss the idea that this was a scary thing. He's in the stage of his life where science is very cool and big things moving in the earth are even cooler. He does not connect that real people just like him live where all this is happening. It's like a cartoon to him, and that's probably just as well. His comment after I explained all of this was, "On Monday, I will tell Taro that there was a big earthquake and tsunami in Japan." I suggested that Taro might already know.

Over the weekend, my son asked what a nuclear accident is. This feeds into another parenting principle -- if they're asking, you need to answer. But explaining nuclear power to an adult is hard enough, let alone a kid. I explained it this way:

There are lots of different ways to make electricity. A lot of times, to make electricity you need something very hot. Often they use fire by burning coal or gas. Another way to make something very hot is called nuclear reaction. They take two chemicals and they bang them together, and it makes a whole new chemical and it gets very hot. The chemicals are dangerous, so they keep them in a strong container so they won't make anyone sick.  After they use the chemicals to make the electricity, they're still hot, so they put water around them to cool them down.

In Japan, they had a very smart system. As soon as there was an earthquake, the chemicals stopped banging together. That was really good thinking. But the earthquake broke the part that puts water around the chemicals to cool them down. So they are really, really hot and people are worried because they might melt the strong container and let some of the chemicals out, and people could get very sick from that.

This explanation is not very precise, but I thought it wasn't bad for a five-year-old's purposes, and my son seemed satisfied.

This morning, I asked him if he had talked to Taro about the earthquake. He replied, somewhat dejectedly, "Yeah, he already knew about it." I said I wasn't surprised, and that I guessed Taro's family was very worried. I said (and kicked myself for not saying earlier), "A nice thing to say would be, 'I heard about the earthquake. I hope your family is OK.'" Then, out of nowhere, my son said, "Taro says his grandmother was swept away in the tsunami. He also says that his house is gone and he doesn't know where he will live when he goes back to Japan."

Now, let me say up front that I have no idea if this is true. I don't know if Taro said it, and if he did, I don't know if he meant it. It is not at all unusual for kids -- either Taro or my son -- to "try on" a tragedy to experiment with what it would feel like or mean if it were true. Of course, it might be true. My son said that this was a discussion he had with Taro after school at daycare, so it wasn't at all clear to me that the adults knew about it. I put in a call this morning to my son's teacher and left her a message to let her know, in case she didn't, that either this family has suffered a terrible loss or that the kids are trying this trauma on for size. This triggers yet another principle -- if the kids are talking about it, you need to be talking about it too.

My son is still not too phased by the situation. He knows about it, and he knows it touches his friend. It certainly matters to him. But it's about at the level of the extinction of the dinosaurs in his mind. It happened, but it so remote from his experience that there's no real need to worry about it. I don't know about you, but I find myself wishing I could feel that way sometimes, too.

The headlines coming out of Japan today are alarming.  "Authorities scramble to avert meltdown." "Fukushima second worst nuclear accident in history." "Meltdown probably underway at Fukushima." Are you scared
now? How about, "Radioactive releases in Japan could last months?" Obviously, things are bad. How bad? Well, you know, bad. If that seems inarticulate, consider this. As I write this, authorities around the world are bickering about whether the accident at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan is a level 4 or level 5 incident. Oh my goodness. Level 5.

The very fact that we can't articulate any relative level of "badness" may give you some insight into just how hard it is to have decent crisis communications in this situation and, frankly, how unhelpful the media reporting has tended to be. What's a level 4? What's a level 5? What does it mean to the people near the plant? What does it mean to me?

Why is it so hard to get good, straightforward information from the media about this accident? I think there are three major reasons: sensationalism, science and subconscious.

For starters, these headlines are sensationalistic. Sensationalism sells papers and gets web hits. They want to draw you in, and it works, so they keep doing it. It's hard to summarize the scientific nuances of the situation in five catchy words.

This brings us to science. The science here is way beyond what the average American truly understands. Summarizing it quickly for the purposes of crisis communication is pretty nearly impossible. This is especially true because we want the people who really understand this stuff to be working on containing the accident, not explaining it to us.

This leaves us to fend for ourselves, and we have a problem. Our subconscious (ok, that's a stretch, but I needed an "s" word for the alliteration) does not like the notion of a nuclear accident. Those of us of a certain age were reared on the notion that the United States and the USSR were going to blow each other to nuclear smithereens, and that we would all die from radiation poisoning if we survived the initial blast. When we we hear "explosion" and "nuclear" and "radiation," the memory of those lessons is stored in the particular file drawer in our minds which gets opened. It gets worse, because when we hear "nuclear," "explosion" and "Japan," our associations are with horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But let's try to put the hysteria to the side for one moment and figure out what those of us who are not nuclear physicists can actually figure out. Thus far, this is a level 4 or 5 accident. These levels come from the International Nuclear Events Scale, which goes from 0 to 7. A 0 means it has no detectable implications. A 7 is Chernobyl, the only 7 ever to happen. A 4 is a local impact event, and a 5 is an accident with wider consequences. By way of comparison, the Three Mile Island accident was a 5. That probably doesn't help a whole lot, but it's a start.

If you'd like a really good look at why we are so bad at understanding the risk here and why the notion of it going on for a long time is so distressing, I strongly recommend a post over at the blog of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center. The fact that the author has the same last name as me is purely coincidental. I'm sure there are many, many people with the last name "Zikmund-Fisher." Well, actually, just four. This one happens to be married to me, but that's not why I'm recommending it -- it's really good.

Depending on where you live, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan may or may not seem like something that can happen to you.  Here in Michigan, our chances of an 8.9 earthquake are pretty low. Even a tsunami on Lake Michigan wouldn't reach my house. But a nuclear reactor accident? Before today I didn't even know where the nearest nuclear power plant to my house was (it's about 40 miles). Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, chemical spills . . . there are a lot of reasons why you might, someday, need to either evacuate your house or shelter in place.

FEMA has been on us for years to get ready. Most of us aren't. At a recent meeting of CISM providers, the FEMA director asked for a show of hands of how many people had an emergency bag for evacuations.  Less than half of us raised our hands. Then he asked how many had a plan for evacuating their family. In a room of 800 people, I was one of two.

Make no mistake about it. When the time comes to leave your house, you will not necessarily have any time to get ready. Depending on what the disaster is, you might have a day and you might have less than 5 minutes. That's not the time to be thinking about this for the first time.

So, let's get practical. Here is a list of things you can do, roughly in order of the ease of doing them. This list is not exhaustive, nor does it take into consideration every possible catastrophe that could befall you. But it's a start. Find something on this list you haven't done yet, and do it.

• Talk.  Seriously. Have a conversation with the other people in your house and make the following decisions:
• Where would you meet in the event of an evacuation at a time you weren't together. Pick someplace out of the immediate area.
  
• Where would you meet if that place was also evacuating.
• Who are two people outside your area who you will call in an emergency if you can't reach each other, so they can relay messages to the others when they call.
• If you have children and you have to evacuate during the school day, who is responsible for picking them up (if possible -- they may have to go with school personnel, keep in mind).
• If your children are home alone, where should they go? Who is a safe person who is nearby who can help them?
  
• Find out what the official evacuation route or procedure is, if there is one, for the catastrophe most likely to happen in your area.
• Educate yourself about that catastrophe. Find out what the dos and don'ts of surviving it are. Do this even if you think you already know. Conventional wisdom may well be wrong.
  
• Make sure you have a battery operated radio and a flashlight, and that everyone in the house knows how to use them. Also make sure everyone in the house knows where in the house is safest in the event of an earthquake or tornado, if applicable.
• Make a list of the medications everyone in the house takes, both so you can grab them on your way out and so you can tell people at the shelter if you don't have your meds.
• Make sure you keep 3 days worth of food in your house at all times. It doesn't have to be 3 days of great food, but don't let your cupboards get bare.
• Stock up on clean water. You should have one gallon per person per day for 3 days. If you have a chest freezer, you can stick a gallon or two in the freezer, which will also save electricity.
• Create a bag with the things you would need if absolutely everything else in the world were destroyed. This probably includes medications, vital documents, a first aide kit, and at least a little non-perishable food. Put a list in the bag of anything that isn't in there that you need to remember (e.g. your child's asthma nebulizer).

Not only will these steps help you stay safe, they will help you stay sane. In the event of an emergency, you want to be able to devote as much of your energy as possible to doing what needs to be done and not add to the crisis with your panic at not knowing what that is. Being prepared makes people resilient. That won't make a major disaster fun, but it will make it doable.

In 2004, I accompanied 12 middle school children on an exchange program for 11 days in Hikone, Japan. In case you're wondering, Hikone is southwest of Tokyo, north of Osaka, and nowhere near the major damage of the earthquake. However, all things are relative -- Japan is not that big a place. As part of our trip, I spent several nights at the home of a local school administrator, Masaru, and his wife, Kayo. We hit it off tremendously, and have kept in occasional contact ever since.

Yesterday morning, right after I heard about the earthquake, I sent an email to Kayo and Masaru, telling them we were praying for them and all of Japan and expressing our hope that they and their family were safe. This morning, I got a response. I should mention, by way of explanation, that although both of my friends speak fairly good English, they often use an automatic translator in email. I still give them credit, since I can barely order dinner in Japanese. Here is what they wrote:

Dear Naomi,

The earthquake made tsunami. And then it attacked the area of north in Japan. We felt a bit of the earthquake. All of family are safe. But over 2000 persons dead now in Japan. I worried about electric power of atomicenergy. That was broken. A lot of radioactivity was spread. A few days later or month later Japan will be more miserable. Now we are alive. Of course in future we live. But...   We hope a lot of people alive. If people are alive, we can make new Japan like Kobe city. Japanese have Bushido sprits. I believe so. Thank you so much for us to pray.

Bushido, if you're not familiar, is roughly translated as "the way of the warrior." It is the Samurai way, the basis for much of the value system that underpins Japanese society. To say that the Japanese have Bushido spirits is to say that they're tough and they'll stick this out.

This email has stuck with me all day. "We will make new Japan . . . The Japanese have Bushido spirits." Part of the mythology of this tiny, earthquake-prone country is that earthquakes happen to reorder the world. They set things to rights. They allow things to start over. In some traditional prints, money is seen in pictures of earthquakes to show the redistribution of wealth.

This view of earthquakes is very foreign to most "westerners." But it makes a lot of sense. If I never experience earthquakes, or only small ones once in a blue moon, I see them as scary and negative. If I experience them all the time, sometimes really big ones, I need to come to some peace with what they mean and why they happen. That doesn't make them fun, but that makes them bearable. This is what Japanese tradition has done for Japanese society. The whole country, in some sense, has had training in resiliency from earthquakes.

The Japanese have Bushido spirits. They will make a new Japan, as long as people are alive. Tonight, watching the news from the failing nuclear power plants, that last piece is the kicker. The Bushido spirit is needed from those scrambling to cool those cores. I hope it's enough.

In Japanese mythology, Namazu is a giant catfish who lives in the mud on the ocean floor. The god Kashima restrains Namazu with a stone, but from time to time Kashima loses focus and Namazu wakes, thrashing around and shaking the ocean floor. This morning, 80 miles off the coast of Sendai, Japan, Namazu awoke.

An earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter Scale hit northern Japan just after midnight Eastern time. The resulting tsunami devastated coastal towns in Japan, and then made its way across the Pacific, hitting many island nations, Hawaii, and the west coast of the United States. While the loss of life in the U.S. is nothing compared to what has happened and continues to happen in Japan, the damage to ports and harbors is considerable.

This is the largest earthquake in Japanese recorded history. It is likely there has not been one this big in Japan for more than 1,000 years. This earthquake was almost 100 times stronger than the one that devastated the nation of Haiti in 2010.  In a country that builds and practices and prepares for "the big one," this was the big one.

While I don't mean to minimize in any way the devastation in northern Japan, the lives lost, or the very real dangers still posed by emergencies at two nuclear power plants damaged in the earthquake, it's also important to recognize the strengths present in this situation. Japan's construction standards are clearly designed to take an event like this into consideration. If you compare the destruction and loss of life in Haiti, where no such building standards existed, to what we are seeing in Japan, it is clear that Japan was as ready as you can be for something like this. The first news report I heard on the radio this morning was from a reporter standing on a balcony overlooking Tokyo. Just the fact that there is a single balcony left in Tokyo tells you how well the Japanese prepared.

The horror we feel considering what has happened in Japan, then, is very different than what we experienced after the earthquake in Haiti. In Haiti, we saw roughly 230,000 people wiped off the planet by a natural disaster and by the unpreparedness and fragility of life in abject poverty. In the United States, we suddenly knew, in a way that many of us hadn't before, that Haiti was our neighbor and that we needed to step up and help.

The horror many of us feel today is different. Far fewer people have died. Japan is much farther away. And, as I've already said, they were prepared. At the same time, we generally regard Japan as being something "like us." While the culture of Japan may be different, it is a highly industrialized, modern country. We have high expectations for their ability to function in all kinds of circumstances. So we watch what is happening there and realize that if it could happen to them, it could happen to us. In Haiti, we felt guilty. In Japan, we feel scared.

Of course, this is not a one size fits all situation. If you have family in one of these countries, have traveled there, or feel some other connection, then one of these quakes may have hit you in a particularly poignant way. I have traveled to both places and have friends in each. Not surprisingly, as I wait for word about people I know in Japan, my mind drifts to worrying about folks in Haiti I haven't heard from in a while. That's the way it is sometimes. Namazu makes connections when he wakes.