Anticipating the World’s Most Expensive Natural Disaster
The powerful earthquake and high tsunami that struck the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan in March 2011, and that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, have been a perfect demonstration of our unwillingness to take adequate preventive steps against known risks that return with a very low frequency but whose effect can be extraordinarily large. These risks range from local and regional (caused, most often, by heavy floods and major earthquakes) to global, including viral pandemics and an encounter with an asteroid—a very low-probability event that could instantly obliterate our civilization.
Japan stands alone among all modern, large, and affluent economies in facing an unpredictable but inevitable disaster. Unlike the United States, France, or Russia, the country lives with the terrible certainty that its capital, the world’s largest megacity, will eventually be hit by a strong earthquake that will amount to the most expensive disaster in history. Washington can get an occasional heavy snowfall and it can be affected by hurricane winds and flooding. The Seine can submerge large parts of Paris (as it did in January 1910 and threatened to do in 2003), and unusually strong winds can topple trees that stood for more than two centuries (as happened in December 1999 when Versailles lost many of its ancient trees). Moscow is threatened by nothing worse than a severe winter or summer drought affecting the surrounding countryside and producing (as it did in 2010) massive forest and peat wild fires that veiled the city in heavy smoke for weeks.