[At-Large] A message from the other side of Pacific

Izumi AIZU iza at anr.org
Wed Mar 16 15:57:21 UTC 2011


Dear AtLarge community,

Thank you for all the care and warm messages.
As you have seen/read, the earthquake and Tsunami hit North Eastern part
of Japan on Friday so badly.

As time goes, we are learning more damages and losses.
Thousands of people are still missing mostly in the coastal areas.
The nuclear stations have ongoing problems which is escalating.
Afterquake became daily or hourly event even in Tokyo, but sending
more uncertainty to already scared people in the severely affected areas,
especially these people in the shelters. That is some half a million people
with little food, oil, blankets and medicine.

I was inside a subway train when it hit. It was a little scary. The
train stopped,
the announcement came - Large-scale earthquake is hitting us.  etc. Then
after 20 min, it moved slowly to reach the next station, Ginza, very center of
Tokyo. It took some three hours to walk back home, by 7 pm. All of my
family members, colleagues and friends around Tokyo are fine.

A number of us are starting to discuss how to help and support the relief and
recovery works to come, in terms of information gathering and sharing using
the Internet (and other means as well). Members include local and also central
government people, Cloud and SNS providers, software guys, etc.
still informally yet. We feel sharing the information timely and effectively
is one of the key elements for post-disaster activities. Not easy, though.

I hope you guys are having fruitful meetings in San Francisco, or participate
remotely at home. I also hope new gTLD introduction will make significant
progress including the geographic TLDs. The City of Sendai's director
for Information policy is one of the most active participants of our study
group for geo-TLD. He is doing his best now to help support citizens.

Anyway, I miss you all, but hope you also note what happened
across the Pacific.

best,

izumi



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