Japan to California: The Past Few Days

While the nuclear plant situation in Japan is still far from resolved and both the actual information as well as the ramifications of the earthquake and its aftermath are going to continue for quite a while, a few summary thoughts might be in order now.

I've concentrated here on my most immediate situation, that of far northern California, where in fact the tsunami generated as the result of Japan's offshore earthquake had the most consequence. But even with damages estimated at $50 million and likely to go higher, and with the only life lost in the U.S.--a young man who got too close while trying to take photos--we got off lightly.

That the tsunami hit at low tide may have been part of it, or because of other physical factors. I am more concerned with the quality of information, and my own knowledge, especially in view of future possibilities. The earthquake and the tsunami hit when it was night here and in the U.S. generally, on a Friday. The nuclear plant problems are happening now, on the weekend. So national news outlets are even weaker than usual, and it turns out that on television and to some extent on the web, they are weak indeed. The only consistent source of information in those early hours particularly was CNN, and it remained among the best on TV. Once NBC got its "A" people on it, they were as good or better. (I also learned that hereabouts we don't even get the Today show--it must be on too early for those interested in news here. On the NBC affiliate we instead got poker. I am not joking--apparently gambling is what viewers want at 4 am.) ABC seemed the weakest, and CBS was not worth watching either.

But none of the national news was up to the standards of network news in the 1970s or particularly in the 1980s, when a robust CNN and CNN Headline News pushed the networks into competition. Now there is no Headline News (it was still nonstop celebrity trash on HLN--a real travesty to pass through it between tsunami footage on CNN and MSNBC), CNN and the networks' news operations are phantoms of what they were.

Then there is the question of judgment, which is harder to answer. There certainly was a lot of misinformation given out--not just of wrong early estimates of the earthquake's strength, for example, but of how long a tsunami takes to get across the Pacific, which one channel insisted for awhile was 24 hours (it's under 12.) But there's also the question of alarmism. A couple of the meteorologists were emphatic in repeatedly emphasizing worse case scenarios, even beyond what official information was. This could be viewed as responsible, in making sure people knew to take it seriously and to not be surprised by the freakish but possible disaster. Or it could be viewed as the seriously bad habit of weather forecasters and their ilk in ginning up oncoming rain or snowstorms out of proportion, to scare people presumably into staying glued to their TV between panic fillups and grocery store sprees. This was happening before I left the mid-Atlantic, and I've been told it has annoyingly continued.

I've always felt more vulnerable here however because of the dearth of professional local TV news. We're down to one station now, which seems to employ a staff of about 3 reporters and anchors. When something big happened in Pittsburgh, I could count on three TV stations with large news staffs that included seasoned and serious reporters, a mix of veteran locals who knew the area intimately, and young reporters and anchors in town for seasoning on their way up the chain in network and bigger market news.

I found that the official information, however conveniently available on the Internet now, to be too limited to be very useful. The radio was a haphazard source but all things considered the best one for local information. All of this is not much comfort for a big disaster here, since electricity and microwave transmission are apt to go along with everything else for awhile. We'll probably be left with what we had the last time we had big storms and a significant power outage here--by the grace of a few dedicated people who find a way to keep broadcasting on the radio, with enough phone lines open to gather information and receive calls.

My own process, documented for good or ill in my blog posts, had my concern growing. Whether it grew out of proportion remains in part a question that can't be answered, given the possibilities that might have been realized. However, I should have known that even the worst scenarios I was hearing would not put this house in direct danger. Still, in the course of a few hours, life in general here could have changed significantly for all of us for some unknown period of time. Contemplating that was a part of this experience that probably has its uses.

While it is prudent to think first of impact on one's own home and loved ones, the horrific weight of all this continues to be felt in Japan, where the death toll continues to rise, perhaps to many thousands, and now this nuclear nightmare unfolding--especially with the possibility of another explosion , with widespread destruction including perhaps a wasteland for decades to come. This dwarfs our worries here.