Japan: Day Eight

"The fortunate ones will be billeted indefinitely on the floor of school gyms and town halls – and with more than half a million now homeless these shelters are rapidly deteriorating into freezing, unsanitary hell-holes."

Getty Images/AFP

Photo by EPA. Snow covers the remains of the town of Minamisanriku
in the prefecture [state] of Miyagi.

[the mayor] began to suspect officials were deceiving him when members of the Jieitat, the government-run civil defence force began to evacuate. Ministry officials said it was a routine measure.

'But [the civil defence force] saw this and many started panicking,' he said. 'Who could blame them? They had endured a terrible tsunami, in which more than 1,000 have probably died here, and now they feared a nuclear disaster.

The above photos and quotes come from London's Daily Mail and it is a story of both local officials and ordinary people who were counting on their federal government to come and help them (and were promised help) and, eight days into the disaster, nothing.

If you read the story, your memories of Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill will come to mind. I bring this to you for two reasons:

• The Japanese people need our prayers and our assistance. 
• There is zero reason to believe the U.S. government (based on past experience) will do better than the Japanese ("the best prepared nation in the world for disasters") when the next catastrophe occurs in the U.S. This is why I urge you to be prepared to be self-sufficient for at least two weeks. There are suggestions in postings below.