WHEREVER you are at 1-46pm local time, I encourage you to observe five minutes of silence to mourn the 10,000-plus people who lost their lives a week ago in the Tohoku region of Japan-At the same time, please continue to remember the 166 - and counting - souls who perished in the Christchurch earthquake just 16 days earlier- Although dwarfed by the Japan tragedy, it was no less of a catastrophe and should not be overshadowed to the point of being obscured-But while New Zealand is having to cope with picking up the pieces of a 40- second long, 6-3 temblor that brought with it a 11ft-high tsunami in the Tasman Lake, Japan has had to face a five-minute long 9-0 megathrust earthquake that was 8,000 times more violent than Christchurch's- And then a 30ft-high tsunami that travelled at speeds of up to 800km/h- And then over 500 aftershocks throughout the nation of which 35 have a magnitude greater than 6-0-As if not enough, there also looms a nuclear crisis of epic proportions-Just how much can a country take - even one as technologically and economically advanced as Japan and with a population that, as S-C- Cheah describes on page 10 of today's issue, are generally pragmatic, disciplined and stoical?The thing is, if any nation on earth can emerge from the ruins of such a succession of calamities and be stronger for it, it is Japan-The fact we are able to know so much, see so much and glean so much data from the catastrophe is because it happened in a country with the best seismic information in the world and because it is so connected it can dispense volumes of up-to-the-minute information- In fact, as you read this, some of the figures might already be out-of-date-Indeed, the events following the Tohoku temblor is being used to mine valuable information to give greater understanding and provide solutions to mitigate the fallout of future catastrophes-As Andreas Reitbrock, a professor of seismology at the University of Liverpool, said, "we have for the first time, the possibility to model in great detail what happened during the rupture of an earthquake"-The Japan quake also prompted the Lunghwa University of Science and Technology in Taiwan to release a disaster alert app for smartphones two days ago-With it, the latitude and longitude coordinates of people trapped in earthquake rubble or under mudslides can be transmitted to any number of people-Costing US$2-99, all proceeds from Mobile Savior will "go to victims of the devastation either through Japan's foreign ministry or a Red Cross chapter" as well as be used for "reconstruction and housing for people displaced by the temblor"-Curiously, I wonder why such an app wasn't available following Taiwan's last major earthquake in 1999 that killed some 2,400 people-On our shores, there are many things the quake can shake us into doing too, and I would suggest we look inwardly at how we would cope if just one of the disasters that hit Japan befell us-That's not to say we haven't learnt from the past: From being a country that had to claw help from nations such as Japan and France following the 1993 Highland Towers tragedy, in the matter of a few years, we were able to build up specialised rescue teams that we can send to places in need of help-With the cataclysms of Christchurch and Tohoku still playing themselves out today, there is so much more we can learn-We could relook the guidelines for building on hillsides and seafronts- We could also create disaster resistant communities and a population of first respondents armed with the knowledge to deal with disasters- And we should examine whether going nuclear is really in the best interest of the country or if it is merely a stubborn idea-Instead of looking back in regret, I hope one day we will be able to remember 22-02-11 and 11-03-11 and say we're all the stronger for them-...
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