ABSTRACT
What do you do when you are facing an event that you have never seen before, you don’t know what to do, but you have legal responsibility for protecting the lives, property, and continuity of operations for your community, so you must do something? This dilemma confronted public managers at municipal, prefectural,1 and national levels of operation when a set of triple disasters struck Northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. This classic “Black Swan”2 set of events was beyond anyone’s imagination: a massive 9.0 Richter scale undersea earthquake generated an immense tsunami wave reaching heights of more than thirty meters in certain locations along a 290 km coastline (Cabinet Offi ce, 2011). The main shock at 2:46 pm local time was followed by a rapid series of aftershocks, including two over magnitude 7.0 within the next twenty-nine minutes (JMA, 2012), shattering infrastructure, shutting down electrical power, transportation, and communications throughout the region. The powerful tsunami wave, reaching heights of over fi fteen meters on the Fukushima coast, fl ooded the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, disabling the backup generators and causing two reactors to malfunction, overheat, and release radioactive pollution into the air, land, and sea of Fukushima Prefecture. This cascade of events overwhelmed the capacity of local municipal and prefectural governments to mobilize response for the damaged communities and region, and tested the national agencies severely in the fi rst days, weeks, and months of the disaster.
