Dealing with 2 disasters

There’s only 2 weeks and 2 days between 222 and 113, 2 dates which have had, and will continue to have for a long time to come, a great impact on our lives.

Our family is a Japanese Kiwi mix and to think that both our countries would be rocked by such similar disasters within such a short time is hard to comprehend.

We have spent 2 weeks dealing with the death and destruction in Christchurch, only to be shocked once again with the utter devastation and waste of human life in Japan.

It’s hard on the spirit to see such pain inflicted on people you know so well.  We live in Christchurch, Jeff lived in Japan for 19 years and Naomi is, well, Japanese.

In the motel rooms we have live NHK Premium feed and so we watched Japan’s North Eastern coast being systematically destroyed live on TV while many Japanese citizens were stranded without electricity.

We’re pleased to say that as far as we know, all our friends and family are ok.  But still, after 2 weeks of coping with a personal disaster, we find that once again dealing with the start of yet another disaster rather taxing.  We want to know what’s happening, and we want to be able to help where we can.  And at the same time we have to keep coping with our own disaster here in Christchurch.

After finding Twitter so useful in coping with the Christchurch quakes we once again relied on it for info re the Japan disaster.  To be honest we thought we’d find something organised but our first impression that this was not necessarily so.  There were at least 4 different hashtags being used to diffuse information and this of course meant that a large part of the 140 characters was taken up by hashtags.   After seeing the Christchurch example we had a go at narrowing down the options which will hopefully result in a more concentrated flow of information.  Twitter being twitter, it will be decided by popular vote but at least we helped give tweeps a choice. 

It has just been announced that Japan will face rolling power outages from tomorrow as it faces an energy supply crisis of only some 75% of what is needed.  The rolling 3 hour outages will occur between 6.30am and 10pm.  No doubt twitter will have a role in getting through this stage of the crisis, after all it’s helped us all through the 6 months of our crisis here in Christchurch.