Sunday, April 10, 2011

The full scope of a terrible tragedy

Going beyond nuclear ...

Amplify’d from www.reliefweb.int

Japan: no end in sight to the unthinkable




A woman at a north Japanese shelter supported by ACT Alliance laments that the unthinkable has happened to her people - and continues to plague them.

"You know, this disaster we thought was something that happens in far away countries, and we never expected that it will happen to us. Aftershocks come every three minutes, and it is still unbelievable what has happened here."

Then, she offers visitors to the shelter a piece of steamed sweet potato, her spirit of generosity stronger than her own wish to eat.

The scale of the twin earthquake and tsunami, with by the threat of nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has now been compouned by severely cold weather. Although Japan is equipped with superior disaster response mechanisms, even it is struggling to deal with the disaster. Police report that 27,000 are dead or missing since March 11. About 300,000 people are living in over 2300 official evacuation sites across Japan, with possibly thousands more in unregistered centres, putting the number of people living at evacuation sites at possibly well over 500,000.

Read more at www.reliefweb.int
 

No comments:

Post a Comment