Ghosts of the Tsunami

Exactly 15 years ago, at 1.50pm on Friday 11th March 2011, I was on the Hong Kong trading floor, lunch had finished and my thoughts were already turning towards beers after work and the coming weekend.

Suddenly there was a commotion, as urgent messages started coming through on the squawk boxes and telephones. The Tokyo office was violently shaking in an earthquake. Whilst tremors were not unusual this one was sufficiently alarming for our Japan based staff to alert Head Office in Hong Kong, whilst simultaneously ducking for cover.

A magnitude 9.1 earthquake had struck in the Pacific Ocean, 72 km east of the mainland. The most powerful ever recorded in the region. Within an hour we were watching the TV screens with horror, as pictures showed a tsunami engulfing towns along the east coast of Honshu.

I have written before about the resilience lessons learned from that experience, and the following weeks I spent in Japan as Fukushima smouldered (see comments). 

Concluding that if we see resilience threats and defences as primarily technical in nature, able to be solved through engineering solutions alone, then we may be falling for the comforting balm of false certainty and linearity. 

And we may be building our fortifications for the last wave, not the ones coming.

I have also just finished reading Ghosts of the Tsunami, by Richard Lloyd Parry who spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. 

It is a brilliant and haunting book that focuses on the fatal decision making that led to the tragic drowning of 74 pupils and 10 teachers of the Ogawa Elementary School, and its aftermath. 

In particular why the students remained at the school for 40 minutes on the instructions of their teachers, rather than evacuating to higher ground, and how parents and survivors were tormented by those catastrophic decisions. 

As ever, it is also easy to reach for individual blame but in the confusion and panic of the moment, group hesitation, authority ambiguity, and risk misperception all played their fatal role. 

Grasping for strong explanations of either technical failings or for individual fault can assuage our yearning desire for clear narratives, or for someone to carry the can. 

But do we turn our eyes away from the complex reality, in the fear of finding out that the world is more unpredictable and messy than we would like? That action and inaction can derive from a complex mix of the personal, the social and the environmental.

And does this trait continue to hinder our understanding and learning?