Chris Blythe
Nature has shown several times this year its power to overwhelm us. There is an ongoing game of cat and mouse as we seek to learn from each disaster and try to dominate our world.
The flooding in Australia, the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan along with the tsunami tend to be accompanied with a host of statistics claiming these to be one-in-one-thousand-year events. One of the most fatuous statistics was that the Japanese earthquake was 8,000 times more powerful than in Christchurch.
When your home has been washed away or destroyed by a quake, such statistics are meaningless. You are 100% homeless and your life has changed forever.
Just because there has been a one-in-one-thousand-year event, it does not mean we will not have another one for a thousand years.
Nor does all this mean that we should try to remove all risk. The crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was severe, but it does not follow that nuclear power is bad and should be stopped. Without a full understanding of the facts no one can draw any conclusions at this stage, although it is likely that nuclear power will become more politicised.
Part of this is the increasing distrust of politicians and so-called experts. It is interesting to see the scepticism the Japanese people have developed towards their leaders as they struggle to cope with the Fukushima disaster, coming from a country which is extremely disciplined in its attitude towards authority.
Here, we are already starting with a public less trusting of business and politicians. As engineers and builders we have a steeper hill to climb to overcome a combination of economic, engineering and environmental naivety, suffused with political cowardice or opportunism, if we want the sort of infrastructure we need to tackle meet both our energy needs and our low carbon requirements.
The building work required to bring some normality into people’s lives is extensive. There is no doubt that the infrastructure and reconstruction that will have to happen needs to learn all the available lessons.
I often wondered why parts of the world were uninhabited for so long.
It is because nature makes them uncompromising places to live in. It is only our hubris in thinking we have all the answers to conquer the natural world that leaves us open to nature’s equivalent of a slap in the face.
