Reuters Investigates

Japanese quake cost bad, but far from the worst

By Ben Berkowitz

The March 11 Great Tohoku Earthquake in Japan was a tragic disaster of historic proportions — but from a purely financial standpoint it pales in comparison. (For a special report on insurers, click here.)

Estimates are still coming in but it seems likely the quake will end up ranking as the costliest of the last generation in insured losses, surpassing even the Northridge earthquake that struck southern California in 1994. (The one that collapsed a number of major freeways, by way of reference).

But looking back historically, it is dwarfed by two temblors in particular — the New Madrid quake of 1812 and the San Francisco quake of 1906. If those events happened today, they would each cause nearly $100 billion in *insured* losses, to say nothing of their total economic impact.

Great Tohoku comes in fourth on that all-time list, assuming the higher end of AIR Worldwide’s loss estimate.

Read the special report “Japan quake reveals cracks in insurance system” in multimedia PDF format here.

Is a 10 percent chance of disaster too high for a nuclear power station?

Kevin Krolicki has another alarming special report from Japan today challenging the assertion that the disaster facing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was beyond expections.

The report quotes Tokyo Electric’s own researchers who did a study in 2007 on the risk of tsunamis: 

The research paper concluded that there was a roughly 10 percent chance that a tsunami could test or overrun the defenses of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant within a 50-year span based on the most conservative assumptions.

But Tokyo Electric did nothing to change its safety planning based on that study, which was presented at a nuclear engineering conference in Miami in July 2007.

Read the full special report in PDF format here.

All Japan, all the time

Two more special reports from Japan today: first up, a look at how globalization has made companies around the world vulnerable to a shock like the earthquake. ”Disasters show flaws in just-in-time production.”

The PDF version, here, has a nice graphic showing the location of Japan’s ports, some of which have been hard hit by the disaster.

The second report takes another look at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It makes worrying reading:

TOKYO (Reuters)- When the massive tsunami smacked into Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power plant was stacked high with more uranium than it was originally designed to hold and had repeatedly missed mandatory safety checks over the past decade.

 The Fukushima plant that has spun into partial meltdown and spewed out plumes of radiation had become a growing depot for spent fuel in a way the American engineers who designed the reactors 50 years earlier had never envisioned, according to company documents and outside experts.

The full story is here: “Fuel storage, safety issues vexed Japan plant.”

Poor Haiti, again

By Pascal Fletcher

If any country deserves the description “blighted”, or a “blot on the conscience of the world”, it is surely Haiti, that pocket of poverty lying in the blue Caribbean just two hours flying time from the richest country on the planet.

Less than 10 months since a huge earthquake jolted the small but densely populated nation of 10 million people, toppling brick homes like cards in the hilly capital Port-au-Prince and killing more than half a million souls, a deadly cholera epidemic is now killing more Haitians by the dozen as an aghast world looks on in another paroxysm of sympathy.

What is it about Haiti that has made it one of the most unfortunate nations on the globe, a case study in misery and underdevelopment, regularly battered by lethal hurricanes, floods and mudslides and encumbered with a bloody history of uprisings, foreign interventions, dictatorships, and government corruption and mismanagement that can rival almost any other state in the world?

In seeking answers, some reach back to the roots of the violent slave revolt that led, after a decade of turmoil, to Haiti’s independence from France in 1804, divining the seeds of future dislocation and chaos in the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade that saw chained Africans dragged half way across the world from their homeland by white traders and planters.

Others point to later foreign mistreatment and meddling in Haiti, from former colonial power France’s stubborn demands for restitution of old damages and debts, to occupation by U.S. marines from 1915 to 1934, and more recently to lopsided trade and aid policies that have flooded Haiti with cheap U.S. rice and sugar and turned it into a “Republic of NGOs” whose often uncoordinated efforts can resemble a modern Tower of Babel.