Leaving Fukushima

Kevin has written a lot about how his family got out of Fukushima, Japan following the Daiichi meltdown.  Parts I through VIII can be found on this site plus Kevin's own travel blog: Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.  As some readers know, I've been working on a book about the whole event to be loosely framed as a creative narrative but altogether more a work of science journalism.  My plan calls for a long and ambitious schedule and party explains why I haven't been writing many articles here recently.  (There are a few other reasons as well, but hopefully I can get some more time for articles soon.)  Anyways, my first thoughts on the disaster have appeared as a functional article on the website Expat Arrivals titled In the Case of Emergency: What's an Expat to Do?  Here is an excerpt: 

In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, the Japanese government was hopelessly inept at pressuring the plant operator to disclose necessary information. When numbers finally came out, they were conspicuously low, and then they got conspicuously slightly less low, and now they’re conspicuously slightly less low than that.

Crowdsourcing and social media surfing is a much better way to stay informed. Basically, we had a dude in Canada who had nothing better to do, so he assembled information from people on the ground and posted it all on his Facebook page. By checking his Facebook page with our Smartphones, we knew which roads were closed, where quarantine lines were, which cities had gas and other supplies and which cities didn’t, the best routes to escape, which way radioactivity was blowing, and what the levels were. We and others challenged the assembled information by commenting and demanding links to credible sources.

The next steps in our constantly evolving plan were decided by piecing together such credible press releases, crowd sources, and scientific articles to get a clear picture of exactly what was happening. The mainstream media was useless for getting accurate information: typically a major news outlet would report what we already knew and had acted on two or three days later, usually riddled with inaccuracies and the trappings of news theatre.

The article is of fairly moderate length (just over 1000 words) and not always relevant to the purposes of the Inductive, but it provides a good glimpse into what it was like getting my family out of Japan for anyone who is interested.