誰かが言わなきゃならない

1. Loss of information connection

How the information disconnection gave fears to the people and confused them? The chain of accidents of the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear accidents brought home to us its crucial importance. The electronic communication contacts were completely lost at the nuclear off-site emergency center in Okuma-cho, Fukushima.
It took them the whole rest of the day till midnight for recovery. The person in charge was explaining the day’s history as though it were not his business. Responsibility must be born by the people who had planned and installed the facility. NTT is the same.
It was too optimistic in assuming the accidents and the following disasters. How the people were frustrated by inoperable mobile phones in minutes after the quake? Messages were carried by post horses in olden times. In modern society, cars or helicopters could have been used for message transfer if electronic communication is lost.
Patrol cars could have accessed Tomioka-cho in two hours if they rush from Fukushima-city. How the police wireless telephones worked? The government, the prefecture or TEPCO were determined to take such emergency measures? I once saw a drill scene on TV for Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPP, when Vice-Chairman of TEPCO flew aboard a helicopter to the site from his Tokyo Headquarters. What was that drill for?

2. Decentralization and networking

Centralization for efficiency can be paralyzed once something serious happens.
Decentralization without networking cannot help the paralyzed system efficiently. A best example is the issue of 50Hz electricity in the East Japan and 60Hz electricity in the West. For the investment efficiency, the capacity of electricity transfer is limited to 1,000MWe between the East and the West. This limitation gives a difficulty now to TEPCO after the accidents.
Express Highways may be another good example. While the highways and railroads on Pacific Ocean side were all paralyzed due to the big earthquake, alternative routes on the Japan Sea side and some in the central region of the Japanese Archipelago (including part of Tohoku Shin-kan-sen) were helpful for transportation immediately after the disasters in Tohoku district, by surviving the earthquake. It is similar on the occasion of the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in
1995.
Decentralization should go together with networking. National level issues should be handled by the government level, not depending on private sectors. There can be some issues to be tackled by individual sectors of industry or groups.
A precision plastic processing firm in Tomioka-cho delivered its products (lens sheaths for digital cameras) to almost all digital camera
manufacturers of Japan. The firm worked 24 hours a day with many employees. The factory hasno hope to resume its production line, but fortunately the firm had several production factories in other countries in Asia. That decentralization allowed the firm to survive.