TOKYO, Sept. 13, 2019—It’s Day 5 and the condition is likely to continue for as long as another week: No power, no hot tap water, no bath, no frozen food in the fridge, no smart phone charging, no television …for tens of thousands of homes in Chiba, only 30 miles from downtown Tokyo. In the modern era, power outage seriously cripples daily activities. Though the storm was one of the most powerful to hit Japan, it could have been avoided but TEPCO, the power company that caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, became complacent and failed to take precautions.
Still-unaccounted for damages are what Typhoon Faxai, the 15th tropical storm born in the South Pacific, left after its landfall in the greater Tokyo area on Sept. 9. Deaths and injuries were few, thank you, but prolonged power outage in the last leg of summer is having unfathomable impacts on daily human activities and industry, from commuting to manufacturing.As of 11:00 p.m. JST Sept. 13, as many as 194,800 homes in Chiba, east of Tokyo, were without power, according to TEPCO’s website.
It was fortunately that the typhoon hit an area that did not have nuclear power plants, like in March 2011 when a powerful earthquake struck a wide expanse of northeastern Japan, swamping the Fukushima nuclear power reactors with tall tsunami and triggering the meltdown, which to date has not be securely dowsed.
And yet, the typhoon damages were serious enough to threaten the lives of thousands of people bed-ridden in hospitals, nursing homes and private homes in the late sweltering summer. ‘If we did not have generators and TEPCO’s power supply truck did not come, the people living in our (nursing) facility could have been in trouble,’ an employee of Nagi-no-sato elderly nursing home told me Sept. 12.
What triggered the widespread power failures, according to TEPCO and local government officials, were mostly fallen trees on to power lines. Hundreds of trees are said to have fallen on to power lines, the reason why power restoration is being delayed.
It was apparent that TEPCO had been complacent about the danger of falling trees as it was in the purported safety of the Fukushima nuclear power reactors before the meltdown. Its safety-related budgets blindly focused on nuclear power reactors, the company apparently ignored or oversighted the risk of power outage from falling trees. Otherwise, there cannot possibly be hundreds of trees fallen over power lines.
Power outage in Japan used to be rare and if it happened, it was restored in a mater of hours and rarely took days. The latest blackout could prove the longest on record for TEPCO if it continues into next week.
Though it’s a different business, before Japan Rail companies were split up and divested as private entities from the former national railway, Japan Rail (Kokutetsu), disaster precautions to prevent train stoppage were as such that even on days of heavy snowfalls and torrential rains, Japan Rail employees made sure that trains run without delay, even by seconds. I remember viewing footages of Japan Rail engineers heating the train track switches in frigid, heavy snowy nights, and clearing tree trunks and branches in summer to prevent them from falling onto the railway tracks.
We bid farewell to the era of precautions and said hello to complacency.
–Toshio Aritake