New EQC Chair and former Ambassador to Japan, Sir Maarten Wevers, recently visited the Japanese city of Sendai that was devastated in the tsunami following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011. The quake triggered a tsunami 40.5 metres high and travelled up to 10 kilometres inland. The World Bank's estimated economic cost to Japan from the earthquake was $US235 billion making it the costliest natural disaster in world history. Sir Maarten explains how despite pronounced ethnic, political and geographic distance, Canterbury Kiwi's and the people of Sendai are intertwined through adversity, courage and the determination to rebuild their shattered lives and homes. |
"I went to the area that was hit by the tsunami and a whole town's gone. So that was really very moving. I know Sendai very well. When I was living in Japan, there's an active New Zealand society up there. The chairwoman told me that on the day of the 11th of March, which is the day of their tsunami, the Society members were all ready to go out on the streets and raise money for Christchurch. They had a public collection campaign organised for that very day which they never undertook."
"The scale is enormous, 25,000 dead, 5,500 people missing, unaccounted for, so that's really gruesome. These are mainly people washed out to sea, one suspects, and so they don't have the body to grieve for, they can't have a proper funeral, so that's really difficult. So just to see a place where there used to be a whole town and where there is now nothing, is pretty horrifying."
"Whole towns are gone. People still own the land, but they're creating their own sorts of red zones, or they're trying to. And people have been told they can't live there anymore because it's too dangerous. Some people are not accepting that. They say "Our family has been here for 300 years and we're not moving", so that's a really difficult issue. The recovery's going very, very slowly because they've got big issues around whether they relocate some of these towns. There are lots of them up and down the coast where they want to relocate the whole fishing village away from the sea up on to a nearby hill. Huge issues about whether that's possible, whether people want to go. Some people are saying "Yes in our town we want to go", others, they don't."
"If your house burns down by fire in Japan you get 100 per cent of the insured value. If the same house gets destroyed by an earthquake or a tsunami you get up to 50 percent, depending on your company's policy. It may be as low as 20 percent, depending how much you paid. So for the same level of total destruction you don't get compensation, and the big policy difference is that the earthquake insurance is not a make good provision in Japan. What it is, is a means of providing compensation for the disruption of one's way of life. Citizens are also given up to three million Yen, which is about $NZ37,000 from the local authority as a cash payment, as a welfare grant. That's the sort of thing to allow them to buy new furniture, to relocate to another house, to start making a down payment on the rent or whatever, but it's not going to last forever - to tide them over, and after that they're on their own."
"They have nobody doing the repair programme in Japan. Everybody is left to their own devices because it's a cash settlement process. There's no other option. So it's going to take a long, long time to fix. But having EQC is much better than not having EQC. Can EQC be improved? Of course. Could we have done it better? Of course. Was everybody totally prepared for this? Never. You never would be. So what that makes me think, as Chair of EQC, is what is our preparedness now for a major tsunami in New Zealand? And that's part of our job, to prepare New Zealand communities for that. If we had a nine in the Kermadec Trench, do we know what sort of damage that would bring to us?"
"The way the Japanese dealt with it was praised by everybody, because they're a very tight community and they were overwhelmed. Devastating for the individual families of course, and some of them have lost everything, all their family members, and they do want to stay on the land so there's a real turangawaewae concept that's very deeply embedded."
Download and read Sir Maarten's full report.
http://www.eqc.govt.nz/about-eqc/publications/reports/sendai-a-personal-perspective
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