Maybe. But people can surprise you. They may take the third route -- bug in and isolate, but not try to sneak out because of the off chance they may carry the contagion with them. This takes a lot of personal discipline, and it's not what we expect in the age of me-ism and instant gratification. But I really think a lot of people would be willing to take a (controlled) personal risk for the greater good.

> Is anyone here Aware of Life in General in The many Cities,Across

I'm not sure what you're struggling to say. I used to go to school in Camden, NJ, a very dangerous town. I lived in an area in Philadelphia which was on the safe end of the block, but if I walked to the other end, my life was in danger. Is that you're point? Some places are dangerous without regard to any disaster? Is that news?

Your posts are hard to read, so I'm sure I'm just missing the point.

This New York Times article about one remote village's actions after the quake are remarkable. No one from the outside reached their small village for 12 days.

However, I don't think the remarkable way that these people banded together and self-organized is unique only to Japan. They have more practice at it, just due to the culture, but I think that in general, people are more likely to come together than to turn inward during times of crisis. However, I think that some sort of leadership function is crucial. At least someone to provide the first spark of motivation to get things going.

I think the more doomsday scenarios people envision often require a total lack of any sort of leadership to organize, motivate, and boost morale. As we've seen in North Africa lately, even the threat of violence and physical harm don't necessarily keep everyone at home, if they are motivated and have a goal in mind.

I think the last few paragraphs are also intriguing, about the value of the spontaneous groups and systems that survivors had organized themselves. Often, pre-arranged plans are imposed from above, totally devoid of any input from the people affected. But left to organize themselves, perhaps these are the most useful and enduring plans or systems of them all.

Arney, thank you for that article. It is a compelling account of community survival.

If I get the spelling right it is more a testament to the spell-check included in Firefox than any personal virtue. I'm not sure if it was a complaint, assertion, or handy excuse when one of our founding fathers said 'only a fool can spell a word but one way'. If you like highly variable spelling try reading some Chaucer in the original form. If memory serves there is one section where the same word is spelled three ways. I did it years ago and once you get a roll going it is pretty fun.

I'm far from perfect ie: "fast but you[r] post won't scan" but the ability to scan a text quickly is pretty high on my list of what I'm shooting for. I also value clarity and an artful turn of phrase but I'm never quite sure how and when that happens.

More on-topic, the Japanese grow up having a strong sense of public duty drummed into them. To fail to help someone in need is something of a crime against society, and such crimes trigger a strong sense of shame. Some other sites claimed that the manager of the nuclear plant cried because he lied. More likely he cried because he was simply ashamed that things went wrong. As manager he feels a public duty to anticipate problems and prevent them. Any failure to do this, even unreasonable expectations that he save his forty year old plants through a tidal wave, are taken as a personal failure.

If you want to understand this it might help to look at firefighting in Japan in the late 30s. Firefighters at that time had a sense of dignity and honor. They also fought fire not just with equipment and water, but with resolute will and determination. Every station had a banner that symbolized the heroic history and honor of the company. Each company also had a designated banner holder. This was often the handsomest man and both the banner and his uniform were usually elaborate versions of the standard uniform.

This is somewhat like the regimental colors at the height of the British empire. A regiment would follow their colors and great efforts, many a heroic action, was centered on saving the regimental colors. Having your colors captured was an insult to the regiment and all who served in it. Some regiments had hundreds of years of history.

Japanese fire company colors in the 30s worked like this; at a large fire the banner and holder would be sent to stand in front of the fire. There, striking his most heroic pose, the banner man would symbolically make a stand. His roll was symbolic. In effect daring the fire to advance and inspiring his compatriots to fight harder. The guy holding the banner was never supposed to do anything but stand heroically and should encouragement.

It kind of worked in the 30s. With lightly build single-story houses the fuel burns out fast and if you can knock down and wet the area ahead of a fire the fire may not last long enough to dry the wet fuel or catch. Still ... it was not uncommon for guys holding banners to get burned, and it wasn't unknown for them to die. Worth noting that those who were immolated and remained resolute to the end got special honors. A special shrine commemorated in your honor, regular ceremonies, and having children sing songs about your deeds were all thought fitting if you demonstrated resolute determination.

By the early 40s most fire companies had eliminated the banner holder. This was a response to the western way of doing things but also a practical response to taller, more heavily constructed, and often industrial, buildings where the fire did not spread in a way that a small number of men might set a line as easily as setting a banner and defend it. Modern firefighting is more about defending only what can, or can be made, readily defensible, and giving ground when the fire is too strong. But even into WW2 there were still recorded cases of firemen with gloriously brocaded uniform and banner standing in front of an advancing fire.

The Japanese have never entirely given up on the idea that through sheer force of will and determination you can accomplish anything. That if things go wrong it is, at least in part, a failure of effort, will and determination. That any such failure is shameful and a black mark on the individual, their family, their district, the nation, and the Japanese people. Yakuza are said to lose a finger for failure. In earlier times you might be expected to commit suicide.

You can't associate failure the way the Japanese conceptualize it with western concepts of fault and culpability. A westerner would shrug, tell people that he didn't design it, and walk away. A Japanese manager is expected to accept blame.

Japan is in many ways still a honor/shame controlled culture. They have westernized since I was there. This isn't always a good thing. A honor/shame culture has both strengths and weaknesses. On on hand you have oddities like grown men dresses dressed in finery and holding banners hoping to help stop a natural force like fire through sheer force of will. On the other you have a society where dignity, order, and the public good are held high and strongly maintained.

Here is a BBC article about another village's experience banding together after the tsunami wiped out their community. Not quite as interesting an article as the one I posted yesterday, but still interesting to read about how people actually react in the face of calamity.

I found this article insightful, and also a little reflective of what we're talking about in the "VENTING -- Some things you can never prepare for" thread. It speaks to the complacency we humans tend to develop, even after large-scale disasters, a sort of "It hasn't happened for a while so the threat must be gone" mentality.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/03/2011325112137360914.html

"...not every small town has a long memory... the lessons Yoshihama leaned over a century ago take a while to learn.

"Of course in the short term, the lesson is to build on high ground," said Yokoishi, pointing out that not every town has the same sense of history.

"But in the long term, maybe 10 or 20 years, people will forget and ... they will build by the sea."

Bacpacjac ... I have seen exactly the same things happen out here in L.A. A lot of building has taken place in regions by the San Andreas fault line - it just doesn't make any sense at all. I used to live in the community of Lancaster/Palmdale (CA) which is one of the groups of towns that are on the fault line. In the old days, there were not so many houses, and the buildings were some distance from the fault. But then more people started moving there in the 80's, 90's and the last decade - it became a bedroom community for Los Angeles. Many people commute now. And you can find a lot of homes and 2-story apartments built within half a mile of this major fault line. It is INSANE. But the real estate developers just didn't give a cr*p, and people tend to mentally tune out the danger.

I just checked the latest predictions from the US geological folks (USGS) last week. I reviewed their maps really carefully. A lot of these towns beside the San Andreas fault are going to be TOAST if we get a big quake. That includes Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Banning, Littlerock & Valyermo, Palmdale, Lancaster. And other places.

I just don't know what to say about this aspect of human behavior. It's some horrible combination of greed, stupidity, and short-term thinking.

Pete #2

It just shows you don't have to go all the way to Las Vegas to gamble.

I don't think it is as simple as not building in hazard zones. Mostly it comes down to engineering. Buildings can be built to survive undamaged expected activity on most earthquake zones and not kill their occupants even in the worse case. There may be locations where hazards beyond earthquakes may make building structures cost prohibitive, but those locations are pretty few and far between. Floodplains are hard to justify building on because the water rises every year and they often have better use as farmland. Floodplains are usually quite fertile. Something to keep in mind as the price of oil drives up cost of chemical fertilizers.

When it comes right down to it pretty much every location has issues. Earthquakes, tidal waves are big news now but in a few months it will be something else. Come June down here it will be hurricane season. Blizzards, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes hailstorms, the undead rising from the grave, Republicans ... every place has it's hazards. But good engineering can deal pretty well with most of those.

I'm also a bit nervous about any sort of designation that declares a location safe. I can see it for floods simply because water collects in the low spots so there are clearly safer, and less safe, zones. But earthquakes are a little different. Pretty much every location on earth has had them at one time or another. The lack of an earthquake for a long time is no guarantee that a previously dormant fault won't come alive.

And it isn't just earthquakes. On a building forum I was discussing building codes in Florida and how they have over time jacked up the requirements for resistance to wind damage down here. A builder in the Midwest was telling us how it was good he didn't have to tie down his roofs with metal straps because they didn't get much wind. A week later a line of strong thunderstorms the power of a minor hurricane came through and the same guy noted that while none of the homes he built had lost their roof he was thinking he just got lucky. He talked about finding out how we build in Florida and adopting some of the methods. He though it might give him an edge to tell his customers that his houses met Florida wind standards.

He was pleased to learn that the difference in cost was just a few hundred dollars, a small fraction of the cost of the building. He also thought his customers might get a break on insurance if he had a stronger roof structure and tie-downs.

Point here is that for residential buildings the difference in designing for resistance to earthquakes or not is often a few hundred dollars spent on shear walls and strapping. That the main impediment to building resistant buildings, no matter what you are resisting, is often the simple fact that they haven't built them that way there historically.

There is simply no practical reason why a single family home can't be economically built to be resistant to wind storms, wildfires, earthquakes, blizzards, and most anything else. Even tornadoes can be managed. Pretty hard to design a conventional home to resist a tornado unscathed, but a safe room can be built in it that will provide good, if not perfect, protection for anything short of a direct hit by a very strong twister.

In Key West there were small ranch homes built in the early 50s that included a central windowless safe room. The exterior walls had scads of jalousie windows, as befits a tropical climate in a time before air conditioning, but smack in the center of the home was a room, typically six to eight feet square, that was built like a bunker. Usually that is where the heating unit and water heater was. Most people living in them now don't realize what that small room in the middle of their house was. They get used as storage rooms and closets. Some may have noticed the heavy plank door with steel brackets on the inside that allowed you to bar it quickly by dropping in a set of irons or 2by4s.

Building houses to resist local conditions is nothing new. A smart move considering that it wasn't until the mid-60s that people in Key West could count on a significant warning.