Essay On 3/11 Crisis

The 3/11 complex disaster that ravaged Japan’s northeastern coastline and triggered a nuclear accident was brought about by a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan, a region known as Tōhoku, that tookplace at 2:46 pm on March 11 2011, lasting nearly six minutes. It is the most powerful quake recorded in Japan and one of the four most powerful in the world since 1900 when record keeping began. It created forces five hundred times stronger than the 2010 magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Haiti. The Tōhoku quake initiated a massive tsunami that battered and inundated coastal villages along 500 km of coastline and in some areas inflicted destruction as far as 5 km inland. The island of Honshū was displaced 2.4 m east by the …show more content…
Infrastructure suffered large-scale damage, closing many ports along the coast, the principal regional airport at Sendai, railway lines and roads, complicating relief and recovery efforts. At the outset 4.4 million households lost electricity and 1.5 million lost water services. In addition, the earthquake and tsunami jeopardized reactor-cooling systems causing meltdowns following hydrogen explosions at three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, disseminating radioactive contamination and prompting the government to eventually evacuate 80,000 residents living within 20 km radius of the plant. The economic and public safety repercussions from radioactive contamination was gathering as the Japan brand had been tainted, food safety undermined, farming communities ruined. The overall cost of the disaster was estimated to be between $210–300 billion, dwarfing the $125 billion devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, making it the most expensive natural disaster on