Et pendant ce temps là à Sendai

US Military cleans up Sendai Airport with no thanks

Hi!
My research pharmacist niece & her doctor DH in Sendai says the town smells of dead fish and decay, and Norovirus is rampant and there is no medicine.

Meanwhile, my DH while seeing the Self-Defense Forces slowly finding the dead expects a modern day version of the plague as temps warm up.

Meanwhile, the US Military is sent home after cleaning up Sendai Airport. Not invited to the re-opening event.

OMG the Self Defense Forces guy comments on how fast they work and what big machines they have. Looking at the tiny bulldozers, the brooms, the shovels that the local military is given to use is very worrying.

This article from the New York Times is worrying. Whose pride are we talking about? Japanese or Japanese politicians?


U.S. Airmen Quietly Reopen Wrecked Airport in Japan

Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
A U.S. Marine directed the removal of tsunami debris at the Sendai airport on March 25.
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: April 13, 2011

NATORI, Japan — Last month, when a team of United States Air Force Special Forces reached the damaged Sendai Airport, just a mile from the coast, they found a devastated landscape of uprooted buildings, smashed vehicles and bodies of the dead.

Using skills honed in war-torn nations like Iraq, the airmen had within hours cleared part of a runway for use by United States military aircraft. Over the next four weeks, they worked to restore Sendai Airport, where the huge tsunami had flooded the runway and threatened to engulf the sleek glass terminal.

On Wednesday, the airport in Sendai, one of northern Japan's largest cities, nearly 200 miles northeast of Tokyo, reopened to commercial flights for the first time since the earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11.

But when the airport resumed civilian operations, the two dozen members of the Air Force unit, the 353rd Special Operations Group, were not on hand to celebrate. Nor were some 260 Marines and soldiers who also joined the cleanup.

They will have already packed up and gone. Their absence reflects the balance the United States military has tried to strike in Japan, where it has undertaken one its largest relief operations, while also being careful not to be seen as taking a role that might upstage its hosts.

"Our goal is for no one to notice that we were even here," one of the 353rd's members, Maj. John Traxler, said last week. At that time, he was directing taxiing aircraft with a radio on his back because the control tower was still under repair.

This is not to say that the United States military has shied from trumpeting its sweeping aid operation, involving 18,000 personnel and 20 ships, including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. The Pentagon has dubbed it Operation Tomodachi, Japanese for "friend," reflecting its goal of fostering goodwill in a nation that hosts some 50,000 American military personnel.

But this is a proud country that can grow touchy over the presence of the United States, which occupied Japan after World War II and helped configure its reborn military as a nonaggressive force limited to national security and self-defense. So American commanders have been careful to stress that they are in a supporting role, even in places like Sendai, where they were instrumental in fixing the airport.

"We are used to doing this in third-world countries, where we have to come in and do it all," said Col. James L. Rubino, commander of a Marine Corps logistics unit camped in tents on a Sendai Airport parking lot last week. "Here, we make sure the Japanese government and Self-Defense Force have the lead."

Colonel Rubino said that in a less-developed nation like Haiti or Indonesia, thousands of Marines would have been sent in with trucks, heavy equipment, their own engineers and medical staff. Here, he said, the Americans limited themselves to a skeleton crew of 260 Marines and soldiers, who used two dozen trucks and construction vehicles to clear the airport and unload relief supplies.

Se limiter soi-même, un doux euphémisme pour dire "les japonais nous ont fait comprendre que".

"There are concerns about us upstaging the Japanese Self-Defense Forces," Colonel Rubino said.

Near his unit's tents, a small outfit of Japanese construction workers was at work washing away mud, rewiring lights and even using a small bulldozer to scoop out debris from the baggage claim room.

The situation was quite different after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Then, Tokyo rejected assistance by the United States military, a decision that many Japanese criticized for possibly raising the death toll. This time, Tokyo accepted, and promptly.

C'est bien d'accepter, maintenant ce serait bien de les utiliser au maximum de leur capacités et non pas au compte gouttes pour faire genre on a accepté l'aide.

"It was amazing how quickly they could come in and move the debris and broken cars," said Col. Makoto Kasamatsu of the Self-Defense Force.

Colonel Kasamatsu leads a small group of Japanese soldiers who serve as coordinators between the Americans and the civilian airport authority, which is officially in charge of Sendai Airport and has also played a large role in the cleanup.

Within minutes of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, some 1,400 passengers and workers in the terminal suddenly found themselves surrounded by black, churning waves that crumpled parked aircraft like paper toys.

The people were rescued, but the airport seemed a near-total loss — until Col. Robert P. Toth, commander of the 353rd Special Operations Group, based in Okinawa, heard of the airport's destruction. His unit specializes in turning ruined landing strips and patches of empty desert into forward supply bases for American aircraft, but usually in war-torn countries, like Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

"It was clear that opening Sendai airport was the No. 1 priority, but everyone had written it off," Colonel Toth said. He approached his superiors with a plan to turn it into a hub for American relief.

He said when the unit made an initial helicopter survey, the day after the earthquake, the airport was still under eight feet of water.

When the unit arrived three days later, driving in on Humvees that they flew into a Japanese air base a few hours away, the first task was clearing enough of the runway for aircraft to land. In the following weeks, the Americans and Japanese moved more than 5,000 cars that had been washed onto the runway by the waves, lining them up in neat rows along the edge of airport.

When they found bodies, they called over Japanese crews. They would not say how many bodies were found, out of respect for Japanese sensitivities.

With the control tower damaged by the waves, the Americans ran the airport for weeks, guiding their military planes in and out from backpack radios. Ahead of Wednesday's reopening, control was slowly restored to the Japanese.

Since March 15, Colonel Toth said the Americans had used the airport to distribute more than 2 million tons of food, water and blankets.

"This is what we do: look for a disaster, and set up a runway," Major Traxler of the Air Force said. "But I have never seen this level of devastation, not even in combat."

Commentaires de la femme d'un gars de la SDF (-__- pas Sans Domicile Fixe mais Self-Defense Force)

"Is your DH on the ground with the SDF? Has he seen with his own eyes how slow and inefficient they are? I think that you and indeed nobody who hasn't been there can understand the scale of the devastation that they are dealing with. There are still 70,000 troops out there working sixteen hour days. They move deliberately so as not to endanger or injure themselves on the rubble that constantly shifts with the
quakes. As it is, many of them have broken fingers, hands and toes but they strap them up and continue.

I read the article carefully and from my reading of it the comment of the SDF guy is referring to the speed with which the US army were deployed, not the size of their equipment. The article also makes it clear that the US Army themselves wanted an understated mission. And they have been thanked - officially by the SDF and certainly by the SDF staff on the ground, and reported on in multiple Japanese newspapers etc. No, they were no there when the airport opened. That does not mean they were not appreciated.

Sorry, but I'm insulted on behalf of my husband and the other 70,000 men on the ground who have worked with little to no sleep, in similar conditions to the victims, with no rest and who are still wholeheartedly at it. I think there's an attitude that the Americans can always do it bigger and better (though I do not get this from the article you posted, more your attitude) and that simply is not so. Until you have seen with your own eyes or talked first hand to SDF members then don't underestimate what they are doing."

Réponse

"While I appreciate the SDF, that journalists have to find elderly people stranded without food or water for a month is shocking.

That animals died of thirst and starvation is shocking. Did the govt not think this might happen? What rich planet are they living on.

Farmers up north are committing suicide already.

Armies all go through a chain of command, but slow and painstaking never wins against disaster. Never. This is not an origami competition.

In disaster one would think you would go for the army most equipped and prepare. Sadly, this is the US military.

My DH relatives are up north in Sendai, Iwate, Akita. Sorry, they really don't feel the govt is doing much. They are pretty pissed off."