Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on Japan Aid: Help for the Well-Prepared

I think you missed my point.

My consolidated response:

1) Shortages in Fukushima, etc, are not caused by lack of food or money. Japan has plenty of food and money. Japan has a temporary logistics problem with getting food to particular refugee sites, because of a number of issues, most critically that the infrastructure for delivering gas in the east got a severe monkey-wrench thrown into it and it is difficult to truck in enough to do distribution. With specific reference to Fukushima, the widening of the exclusion zone caused refugees to have to be moved twice is as many days, which also caused some issues.

The three closest ports for receiving refined gas got shut down by the tsunami　(along with most local refinery capacity), so it has been getting transported by road from the other side of the country, and that has been hampered by damage to certain roads. One of those ports will be brought online today. As that situation gets better, the shortage of supplies for refugees will ease very rapidly. They're working very hard on that right now. Aid will not speed that process: any charity chosen at random is not better at doing gas delivery than Japanese gas companies, and no part of the relief efforts is blocking on lack of money.

2) Panic is not helping anyone, and foreign panic is feedback looping right now, particularly in the foreign communities. The only reason I have talked to the media at all is to stress the importance of them not panicking and not provoking panic.

3) I respect enormously people's desire to help, but satisfying desire to help is a very different thing from actually helping. The second is very important, the first not so much.

I was on a program on the BBC the other day. Another guest was a foreign aid worker from an organization I will not name. Host: "Where are you?" Him: "Not quite sure, north of Tokyo. The map is in Japanese." When asked about their plans for doing counseling, he said that they would find somebody locally who speaks English, because in his experience at X disasters across the world there is always somebody, and do counseling through the interpreter. One could be forgiven for difficulty in finding the value of his organization's assistance at the moment.

The US military's response has been invaluable -- choppers are very helpful right now, and have been saving lives. If you don't come packing your own distribution network designed to function parallel to the civilian ones, your ability to convert any amount of desire into hot meals at a school in eastern Japan is very limited right now.

After the immediate situation is addressed, Miyagi, Iwate, and the like will have large reconstruction efforts. Japan has the political will and resources to handle this.

A note: It is a very fluid situation. My blog post was written on Sunday, 3.5 days ago. The NYT asked me for a condensed version 2.5 days ago. Please keep in mind, when you're hearing from anybody (including me), you're hearing something which was true X amount of time ago in a situation evolving very rapidly.

I get the feeling that he's moreso responding to the fact that, in this situation, you can't compare the likes of Japan and Cambodia.

Hell, swap Japan for the US - doesn't make so much sense now, does it? It is an incredibly off putting thing to find people thinking that Tokyo is on fire and about to keel over because of what's going on up north, and while I agree with him on that front, I still agree with the parent commenter here about donating somewhere.

In reality, this is all pretty blatantly obvious stuff.

I think what irritates me about the people booking it out of Tokyo is that (a) it helps to panic other people; and, (b) fuel and electricity are on the short side right now.

Long rail journeys and trans-ocean flights don't help conserve either of these.

I didn't "land" this -- I didn't seek it and don't particularly want it. Folks in the media in several English-speaking countries abroad have been contacting me repeatedly for the last couple of days, and when contacted I try to say "Yes, I would be happy to do that" with the goal of improving the reporting available in English and averting panic.

As to why I'm suddenly several reporters go-to guy for this? The biggest reason is that I speak English and am accessible. They know about me because my blog post on Sunday got widely distributed abroad. (I suspect many of them follow Jimmy Wales, who retweeted it.) My blog has working contact information on it. Also, since the media are pack animals, as soon as anybody quoted me then I was a Certified Expert (TM) and so everybody else should quote me, too.

They really should be talking with the guy I talked about in my blog post who actually pushed the button to turn on the warning system at our clients out east. (Someone at the company found I had mentioned them and passed the word around. He sent me a message saying that reading it gave him hope and pride in trying circumstances. I would trade a hundred thousand angry emails from people for that.) Or they could talk to any city office in Japan and ask "So, what is SOP for this sort of thing?"

Either of those would be better choices than me. But, again, they don't speak English and they're not in reporters' Rolodexes. Through a quirk set of circumstances, I am. So when they call and ask "How much should we be panicking?" I say "Don't panic." (A radio station wanted my opinion on the likelihood of them getting poisoned by radioactivity from Fukushima half a globe away. I'm not a nuclear engineer. Of course I immediately said "I am not a nuclear engineer, but to put your listeners at ease, that will not happen." It's the right answer. It probably shouldn't be coming from me, but someone should say it, loudly.)