- Background
Several of the Asia and Pacific developing countries are located in the world’s hazard belts and are subject to occurrence of natural disasters such as floods, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes, windstorms, tidal waves and landslides, etc.
The major natural disasters that happen at times in this region are mostly due to climatic and seismic causes. Weather become increasingly unpredictable, communities and local governments are beginning to recognize the risks associated with the occurrence of increasing number of natural disasters and have begun to ask more questions.
We all need to know what we can do to minimize and adapt to these changes. Some of the expected effects is overall increase in risk of extreme and erratic weather which leads to increase in risk of significant rainfall events resulted to flooding and other known adverse impact such as an earthquake can have catastrophic after-effects and leave lasting damage, requiring years to repair. These deviations for example, may impact everything from species diversity, to habitat health, to human communities can resulted to great loss of life, damage to economic situations and the cruelty of which is subject to on the affected population's capacity to recover. Occurrence of this natural disaster happens to disturb two identified countries, Japan and China.
Japan is situated in the western Pacific Ocean. As it is positioned laterally to the Pacific volcanic belt or known as pacific ring of fire, Japan has numerous volcanic areas and repeatedly disturbed by occurrence of natural disasters. Japan is disturbed by Typhoon frequently each year and Volcanic disasters triggered by eruption and volcanic earthquake. Japan is earthquake prone area because of the physical formation with plate borders of the Pacific plate, affected by these three plates were arranged, “the Philippine Sea plate, the Eurasian plate, and the North American plate” (ADRC, 2008). While China is found in the east of the Asian region, on the western shore of the Pacific Ocean, adjoining the East China Sea, Korea Bay, Yellow Sea, and South China Sea and one of the known countries that often affected by natural calamities. It happened to have 5 occurrences of the world's top 10 deadliest natural catastrophes. It was said that these disasters are naturally happening and frequently affecting millions of people in China annually. These phenomena are said to be damaging the huge part of both social and economic progress of the country. Recorded in China’s history are such cases of tragedies including floods and droughts, atmospheric, seismic, geological, maritime and ecological cataclysms as well as forestry problems and fires in grassland except volcano eruptions.
- Notable natural disasters
Two of the most notable disasters disturbed industries in both nations, due to the ruined manors and also the decreased optimism after the disaster. These two are the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and 1998 Flooding in Yangzi River (Silva, 2012).
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was about 9.0-magnitude tremor shadowed by tsunami waves and measuring at 8.4 seismic intensity scales. The earthquake occurred 130 kilometres or 81 miles off Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, part of the east coast of the Tōhoku of Japan, around 05:46:23 UTC. The depth was 24.4 km or 15.2 miles. From 8.9 on was said to be increase in magnitude scale as measured by United States Geological Survey, of about 9.0. This marks it the biggest earthquake to hit Japan based on their historical records and recognized to be the seventh biggest earthquake in the worldwide.
It was reported that thousands of lives were taken, injured and still missing. People have been observing foreshocks before the event. The earthquake smashed structures and started fires. On-going activities were stopped and closed after the event including the Shinkansen high speed bullet trains and operations in Haneda Airport. Somewhere in Ichihara, it created a large fire broke out from an oil refinery, Chiba prefecture. Cars fall off the bridges and into the water below. The quake moved divisions of northeast Japan by as much as 2.4 meters (7.9 ft) closer to North America creating parts of Japan's landmass "wider than before," Masses of Japan nearby to the epicentre felt the largest shifts. The nuclear plant shuts down automatically but afterwards only to find out that the cooling system of the reactor failed and the fear that the nuclear reactor has the capacity meltdown (AccuWeather, 2011; ADRC, 2008)
Flooding in Yangzi River in the summer of 1998, come into contact with its worst floods in 44 existences. Nearly 4,100 individuals were killed, 13.8 million were displaced and 240 million folks were disturbed openly by the rising waters. The floods sunken about 21 million acres of property, affected 53 million acres private lands and destroyed 11 million acres of crops for agriculture. More than 5.8 million homes were devastated (Fujimi, 2012). Dikes were wafted in Jianli County to save Wuhan, a city of seven million people 150 miles upstream. Even so waters touched midriff near in town centre Wuhan.
Some people were displaced on short announcement and gone astray most of their belongings (Eric, 2007). Harsh rainfall was the key reason of the floods but man-induced causes involved deforestation of erosion-subverting forests in the Yangtze River basin and other zones also backed to the disaster. Although flood is consider as a natural phenomenon and any stream cycle for such cases people develops the river floodplains into occupied areas wherein they built their houses.
These areas are mostly fertile land of tracts and close to the sources of water ideally for agricultural or farming purposes. People don’t usually consider the consequences that may occur or think of other alternatives how to deal with during flood instances (Hays, 2009)
- How It Was Handled
The earthquake and tsunami that smash Japan March 11 rendered meaningless numerous of the standard measures used to measure, manage, and safeguard workers and populaces from chemical dangers. Labels and signs went absent. Superintendents weren’t always accessible to refer. City halls and shop offices were eroded away, and the necessity to care for thousands of displaced survivors flooded the public administrators who might then have fixated on longer-term environmental health pressures. But is it unavoidable that the health and safety tasks now facing Japan would shadow a catastrophe that to steal a phrase resonated infinitely in the months later the earthquake and tsunami. Since the earthquake crash into, Japan has come under weighty blame for its failure to formulate for a nuclear adversity like the one at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Kyoto University calamity planning professional Hirayama alleged some of the same disapprovals relate more largely. Japan was said to be no concrete plan for dealing with chemically polluted catastrophe waste beforehand the tsunami hit. Preferably such strategies would contain detailed dealings for quickly evaluating whether fragments is dangerous or not. Information as well as accountability for environmental monitoring and clean-up is shared between several ministries and branches of local governments, which proliferates the probability that in the end none will accomplish their common obligation (Draggan, 2011).
The condition in Japan is growing, and it’s clear that in an occurrence similar the March 11 disaster, primary alarms will continuously be the instant safety and rescue for everyone distressed. But even all through initial rescue exertions, responders need to be sheltered counter to chemical hazards exposures and when cleaning and reconstruction efforts instigate, the probable health hazards posed by chemical impurities become progressively significant. Judging from the life-threatening difficulty of attaining actual, detailed facts about prospective chemical hazards subsequent the Japan catastrophe, this seems to be an phase of emergency readiness that, regardless of well-established strict disaster-response strategies, vestiges ineffectively addressed.
Subsequently after the 1998 Great Flood in China, several scientific educations and programme investigates were directed on the grounds, tools, and guidelines of mitigation and avoidance. Based on the findings and all references, the Ministry of Water Resources certain to wage more consideration on how to efficiently control water resources in the framework of the change from a deliberate economy in China (Board on Natural Disasters, 1999). The Ministry created a ‘Tenth Five-Year Plan of Water Resources’ in which the succeeding problems were selected as the major emphases for the next period (Glantz, 2003). The efficiency of urban master plans in restraining advance in a disaster-prone zone of China was empirically examined by determining cities’ land-cover variations contrary to their master plans. The plan aids as guidance for urban monitors that lessen assets damage from earthquakes, floods, landslides, land sinking, and increases in sea level, it will significantly bound urban expansion in areas at risk from environmental hazards (Siembieda, 2012). An environmental risk map weighted in the direction of valued systems of land cover was produced using geospatial databases of China's Yangtze River Delta area. Based on these files, the effects of five master plan procedures such as ring-road patterns and block size, areas of urban built-up properties, the sites of industrial parts, and conservancy zoning were confirmed using the multiple regression technique. Cities presenting a high degree of amenability, in specific with conservancy zoning, had a lesser expanse of urban property situated in high-risk zones, on normal, or approximately by 14 km2. Amongst the top ten metropolises open to unreasonably high dangers, eight were townships and only two were metropolises such as Huzhou and Kunshan (Silva, 2012).
An evolution to more ecologically benign resources and manufacturing procedures could help protect community, environmental, and emergency worker health and safety even when natural catastrophes exceed our worst expectations. But countless open questions continue about the execution and suitability of these policies, predominantly in the incident of a disaster with such extensive prospective health hazards as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and Flooding in Yangzi River.
References
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