Japan

My work involves understanding and protecting our clients from all kinds of risk, both those created by man and mother nature. Our office is always awash with talk of natural catastrophes. Fault lines, hurricane forecasting, flood plains, tsunami models, tornado radar detection, volcano activity…. all pretty scary stuff.

There are many ways to anticipate and diminish risk, but no way to eradicate events like Friday’s. Earthquake’s don’t give any warnings like say hurricanes do and one can only imagine what it must feel like to survive a huge quake and realise the tsunami warning sirens are piercing the dusty sky.

Like always, I’ve been glued to the coverage from Japan, a country I have visited and loved for all of it’s quirkiness, history and it’s gracious people.

The ongoing nuclear crisis is somewhat overshadowing the human tragedy caused by Friday’s double disaster, which pulverized Japan’s northeastern coastline. More than 10,000 people are estimated dead. Some of the footage is horrific and my heart sinks when I watch it. Japan is a proud and sagacious nation used to disaster and my heart goes out to those poor people.