Natural disasters a gogo. When is it enough or can it ever be to much.

While I have witnessed many natural and men made disaster through out my short stay on this planet we like to call earth, at least in the English language. Feeling their impact financially, emotionally and maybe even health wise.
I have never once felt sorry for my self. However, I often felt tiered and beaten, maybe even ready to trow in the towel at times.
When ever that happens, I re-call my grand parents life and the stories I grow up with. As children they grow up in war times, the war 1870 was still felt in their parents souls and they witnessed the first world war which was followed by starvation, deprivation and misery, all this, just to live through the second world war as adults, raising their own children surrounded by the ashes left behind a men made agony and yet they managed to raise out of the debris and rebuild a society that even they could not have imagined to be possible after all that was destroyed, devastated and so many souls that where lost for nothing more than humanities arrogance, greed and pride.
Only the last decade of my grand parents life was peaceful and worry free so to speak, all their lives they struggled, worked hard, stayed positive and managed build a future for their children and grand children in spite of all the odds that where against them.
My parents did not have it much easier, they grow up in war times to and the post war era was a continual struggle as well.
By the time they thought that they made it and as we where still children our selfs new conflicts broke out in Niger which we called our home then. Coups, Libyan attacks, famines, diseases broke out and spread like wild fires and my parents lost their home and belongings to a sense less conflict.
Still they started all over again in Algeria just to lose it anew due to some fundamentalist that raided their town.
I went to Canada to build a farm there and spend a lot of energy designing it, building it and making it work, always in the back of my mind to be ready for what ever may happen. I was ready for all sorts of disasters, but not for human hate towards common sense, changes due to climate change and pollution.
I had to let go of my farm after a decade and half putting up with broken windows, people killing my fruit trees with herbicides and burned down buildings.
How I ended up in Japan, where I started to rebuild a farm based on my believes that it had to be environment friendly, organic, energy self sufficient and a model for other to be able to copy with ease so pollution would gradually stop and so we could restore what we humans have destroyed over the past two centuries.
Since I started out here, building and planting, we where struck by two major typhoons causing great damage as well as floods, not to forget one major earthquake and an unprecedented devastating tsunami  that claimed over 20,000 lives and caused the greatest devastation since WWII in Japan.
Nevertheless, what may be much harder to deal with may be the radiation that poisoned our soils, our water and our future. We can rebuild and learn and improve, but we cannot protect our selfs against radiation. A place that is contaminated with radioactive isotopes becomes like a leprae colony, even once it safe again to live and stay in those affected areas, the stigma remains and the people find them self isolated and labeled in the same manner as a leprosy.
This stigma makes it difficult for many, because we humans are social animals and fear nothing more than to be isolated from the rest of our specie.
Further, it is getting difficult to rebuild and find the strength and optimism needed to keep up with it all due to the avalanche of never ending new disasters that keep on striking to no avail and that seem to cause more devastation making the reconstruction more difficult and generating more frustration. It seems at times that for every building that we manage to rebuild several more get destroyed by another disaster. For every repair done, ten more have to be done with each new strike of another earthquake or typhoon.
This latest typhoon just about send me out with an axe to break what ever was left standing and set fire to it. I was so mad, I just had one roof fixed and another still standing when this typhoon took our neighbors greenhouse apart and send all the glass and steel our way destroying roof, windows and more.
I though to my self, how much more can Japan handle before its back breaks? No one knows since it all depends on the people them self and how much they are willing and able to handle.

My grandmother always said "you will never be burden with more than you can handle." This believe made her handle the impossible and I suppose it is true in a way, "if it does not kill us, it can only make us stronger." And hopefully wiser as well. Prevail we shall than. If our generation was to give up or give in for that matter, then all our ancestors would have struggled to survive in wain.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/sep/21/typhoon-roke-japan-video


 

Radioactive iodine spread much further south from Fukushima than originally believed.

A Japanese government survey published on Thursday the 22th of September, showed that radioactive iodine emitted from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant spread not only northwestward but also to the south of the plant.

The ministry of science sampled soil at 2,200 locations, mostly in Fukushima Prefecture, but also as far south as Tokyo in June and July, and created another map indicating the extent of the radioactive contamination as of June 14th.

This map is giving information about radioactive contamination that where not previously published nor know by the public or even government workers.
Officials were able to obtain data for iodine 131 at only 400 locations, because of its short half-life of 8 days and because they waited to long to start collecting data on iodine 131.

The latest map shows that iodine 131 spread northwest of the plant, just like cesium 137 as indicated on an earlier map. But the substance was also confirmed south of the plant at relatively high levels.
The researchers found that accumulation levels of iodine 131 were higher than those of cesium 137 in coastal areas south of the plant.

Officials of the ministry said the clouds that moved southward over the plant apparently caught large amounts of iodine 131 that were emitted at the time.

Iodine 131 could cause thyroid cancer through internal exposure. The ministry is therefore trying to determine at what levels the substance spread immediately after the accident at the plant in March. 

Six month after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima dai ichi plant it is starting to become clear that high level of radioactive Cesium 137 as well as radioactive iodine 131 have contaminated large areas of the prefecture of Fukushima and reached as far North as Hokkaido and as far south as Tokyo prefectures leaving hot spots with well over the maximum permissible safety limits of radioactive elements. Contaminating soil, lac's, rivers and the ocean to a far greater extend than previously believed. 

Still, many areas in the 300 km radius from the Fukushima plant have not been sampled to this day nor has any form of assessment taken place. In stead people are being told that all is fine and that they should not worry. Why so many are taking things into their own hands, trying to assess the amount of radiation their area or town received.

This in some cases could lead to false data and needless fear mongering. Why it is of the outmost importance that all areas be tested and that an accurate map be made public so that the public can make an educated and objective assessment of their own and decide on the actions they want to have implement.

http://houseoffoust.com/group/?cat=32