Deep Dive
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A warning before we start. Many of our cautionary tales end in tragedy, but this one discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support is available. For example, from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US. In the year 869, an earthquake hit Japan. A big one.
There's an account from the time. It tells of violent trembling. People buried under fallen houses, while horses and cows desperately ran about and trampled each other. After the quake came the tsunami. Roaring like thunder was heard towards the sea, the chroniclers of 869 wrote. The sea soon rushed into the villages and towns.
In the 1960s, 11 centuries later, a nuclear power plant was planned for the same area. The project designers had to ponder the lessons of the past. They would build a seawall to protect the plant, of course, but how big should it be? Unfortunately, the account from 869 didn't say how high the tsunami was, so the engineers had to make an educated guess at the reasonable worst-case scenario.
19 feet is roughly the height of a two-storey building. A wave any bigger would really stretch the imagination. If your seawall could withstand that, you should be OK, wouldn't you think? I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES
The nuclear plant was named Fukushima Daiichi, and the engineers thought it was well protected. Then, on March 11th, 2011, one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history sent another devastating tsunami roaring towards the coast. It scoured coastal communities and sucked their remains into the sea, killing more than 15,000 people.
But when, at 3.27 in the afternoon, it struck the Fukushima power station, those engineers might briefly have felt vindicated. Their wall repelled the wave. Alas, tsunamis come in more than one wave. Eight minutes later, the next one appeared, and it was bigger, much bigger.
It roared over the wall. It knocked out the power supply. Without electricity to pump cooling water, the workers knew it was only a matter of time before the reactors started to overheat. But how much time was a mystery, as the control panel had also gone dark.
Desperate workers borrowed flashlights from nearby homeowners. They inched through the bowels of the plant, looking at the gauges. They strained to heave open vents that might release the growing pressure and stave off explosions. But this cautionary tale isn't about the design of nuclear power plants in tsunami-prone areas. It's about what happened next, and what lessons we should learn as we cope with the fallout of any disaster.
Mikio Watanabe and his wife, Hamako, grew up in Yamakiya, a rural rice-growing area not far from Fukushima Daiichi. Mikio and Hamako had been married for 39 years and raised three children. They were looking forward to seeing out their old age in their picturesque hilltop home, but they couldn't afford to retire just yet. They'd taken out a second mortgage to renovate the house for the next generation.
On the evening of the tsunami, as engineers scrambled to contain the damage, the authorities ordered everyone living close to the plant to evacuate. The next morning, they widened the evacuation zone by a few more miles, then more again. As scientists tried to model the radiation spread, more villages got evacuation orders. Eventually, about 164,000 people had been told to leave their homes. Mikio and Hamako died.
were among them. The chicken farm where the Watanabes worked was also forced to close. Who wants to buy chicken raised near a nuclear disaster? Mikio and Hamako lost their jobs. Sheltering in temporary accommodation, they had nothing to fill their days but worry. Mikio says of his wife, she cried so much and repeatedly asked me to take her to our home. In June, they asked the authorities for permission to go back and check on their old house.
It was granted for one night only. The weeds in the garden, they found, had grown to almost head high. Mikio set about clearing them while Hamako cooked dinner. It was just like old times. She was happy to be back in her kitchen. Why not just stay? Did they really have to leave again tomorrow? Yes, said Mikio sadly. Yes, they did.
"Well, you can go back," said Hamako, "but I want to stay here even if that means living alone. I never want to leave my home." "Don't be stupid, we have to leave together." That night, Mikio got up to use the bathroom. When he got back to bed, Hamako grabbed his arm and wouldn't let go. She was crying so hard then. In the morning, Mikio got up early. He went back outside to finish clearing. In the distance, he noticed a fire.
He thought nothing of it. Hamako must be burning the weeds he'd cut down yesterday. Only later did he discover her charred body. His wife had doused herself in kerosene and set herself alight. Three months after the cruel sea retreated, the tsunami had claimed another victim. Hamako's death was horrifying.
but she was a hidden victim of the disaster, because nobody would connect a death by suicide with a tsunami months earlier. It would instead seem a sad and unrelated statistic. For this reason, it's what we might call a hidden death. And hidden deaths are all too easy to overlook. To see why, let's leave the tsunami for a train crash.
I'm sorry, some of our cautionary tales can be like that, I'm afraid. The train in question is travelling north from London to Leeds in the United Kingdom in the year 2000. It's approaching the town of Hatfield at 115 miles per hour, but the rail has tiny cracks. The metal has been getting gradually fatigued. Until now, it's held together, but this train turns out to be one too many.
The cracked rail shatters. The train skids off the tracks. One of the carriages overturns and hits a gantry. Four passengers are killed, more than 70 injured. The Hatfield derailing was a serious accident which raised an alarming question. How many other rails across the country might also be just one train away from failing? The people in charge decided they should take no chances while they found out.
They put strict new speed restrictions on stretches of track across the country and began the painstaking process of examining the tracks for signs of damage. If another rail failed, the thinking went, the trains would at least be going much more slowly. There'd be more chance of surviving an accident. That made sense, but it had a predictable consequence.
Many rail passengers also own cars. And every journey is a choice, which will be quicker, cheaper and less hassle. Slow the trains and you change that equation. Passenger numbers fell by almost half. And when people abandon the train and get in their cars instead, there are fatal consequences. Train crashes, mercifully, are rare. Car crashes are not.
you're 12 times as likely to be killed in a car than on a train for each mile travelled. So if slower trains mean more car journeys, that probably meant more road accidents too. How many more? Crunch the numbers and it was probably about five extra deaths and 75 injuries, almost exactly replicating the toll from the derailment. But there's something else about those five people who died.
They're just statistics. Their names weren't in the newspapers. We don't even know if there were five. Maybe there were three. Or eight. Or, if we were very lucky, none at all. Nobody blamed the policymakers for having allowed another Hatfield. As a society, we tend not to notice hidden deaths. If those deaths happened to our friends or our family, we grieve them. But we usually believe the deaths were bad luck, that they couldn't have been prevented.
Usually, but not always. After his wife's suicide, Mikio Watanabe decided to sue TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operators of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. For them to argue that the suicide is not directly related is unforgivable. If the accident hadn't happened, he said, he and Hamako would have lived a normal, peaceful life.
Tepco had already compensated the evacuees for part of the value of their homes and their lost income, plus a flat fee of $1,000 a month to cover their emotional distress. For Michio, that flat fee didn't begin to acknowledge his bereavement, or his late wife's obvious anguish. He asked the court to agree that it wasn't enough.
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Hamako Watanabe wasn't the only person who found the evacuation after Fukushima too hard to cope with. Fumio Okubo was 102 years old. He heard on the TV news that his village had been instructed to evacuate. "I don't want to leave," he told his daughter-in-law. "Then I've lived too long." That night, he killed himself. A few years later, an official report looked into how many suicides were linked to the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi.
The researchers counted 56. That might have been an underestimate. The national broadcaster, NHK, put the figure at 130. The suicides were only a fraction of the hidden deaths. The first evacuations were ordered in a hurry. As workers strained to ease the pressure in the overheating reactors, a bus would arrive in the village and you simply had to get on with whatever possessions you could carry. There was no time to plan or prepare. How could there be? The threat from radiation brooked no delays.
Some elderly residents of nursing homes couldn't get onto the buses themselves, so they were carried on and laid across the seats. And the bus was driven off without doctors or nurses or, for the first few hours, food or water. Some of them didn't make it. There were longer-term effects from lifestyle changes. Many evacuees were farmers used to the outdoors, and now they lived cooped up. Rates of hypertension rose, and diabetes increased.
Others suffered because they were already vulnerable and their care was being disrupted. Sai Ochi, a doctor and researcher, told the Financial Times, If you compare nursing homes that evacuated with those that didn't, the death rate was three times higher among those who moved. In all, it's reckoned that the evacuation hastened around 2,000 deaths.
And beyond the hidden deaths, there's the hidden suffering. Satoru Yamauchi owned a noodle bar. That had to close. His family didn't want to risk staying just outside the evacuation zone. What if the officials hadn't been cautious enough? And what if they'd underestimated the danger from the radiation?
The Yamauchis decided to move 130 miles to Tokyo, where they had a grim time. They struggled for money. They hated their cramped living quarters. Their children were bullied. Psychologically, says Mr Yamauchi, we were wrecked. But all this trauma has to be weighed against the counterfactual. What the effects of radiation would have been had the evacuations not been ordered? How many would have died?
That question was studied by Philip Thomas, a risk management professor at the UK's University of Bristol. He found a disconcerting answer.
the radiation turned out to be less of a danger than feared. In the worst affected villages, the evacuation added perhaps two or three months to average expected lifespans. In some places that were evacuated, the risk of radiation would have been much more minor, and the gains from leaving were tiny. The statistics suggested that after their years of struggle in Tokyo, the Yamauchis might now expect to live for an extra couple of days.
With hindsight, says Professor Thomas, we can say the evacuation was a mistake. I'm not here to judge that decision. I am interested in understanding it. Predicting the effect of a radical policy such as an evacuation is hard, especially when situations are unusual and fast-moving. Here's a quote from a study published four years after the disaster.
To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative assessment of the risk trade-off between radiation exposure and evacuation after a nuclear power plant accident. Well, quite. It's not like there was a manual. Nor did any single expert have all the needed knowledge. The scientists trained to plot the course of nuclear fallout aren't likely to have also studied the psychological impact of evacuations.
Then there's an idea social scientists call the identifiable victim effect. The behavioural economist George Lowenstein, who studied that effect, explains that identified victims get much more attention and help than much more statistical victims that will predictably emerge in the future.
Charities know all about the identifiable victim effect. It's why they don't show you an infographic about a million children at risk of starvation. They show you a photograph of one specific, named, starving child. How vividly we can imagine the plight of the victim seems to be part of the effect, but only part. We also appear to feel more responsibility to save people from clear and present risks, rather than risks we can't imagine.
We must know are going to materialise, but haven't yet. Perhaps that's what's going on. The fatigued metal rails, the melting down reactors, those are dangers that exist right now. The potential car crashes, the long-term psychological wreckage, we cling to the hope that these might not happen, however irrational that hope might be.
A few weeks into the UK's COVID-19 lockdown, emergency room doctors started to notice that they were getting half as many calls as usual about heart attacks and strokes. Perhaps, for mysterious reasons, people were having fewer heart attacks and strokes. That would be nice, but it seems unlikely. More likely, people were sitting at home thinking, I might get the virus if I go to hospital. It's not too bad yet. I'll see if it passes.
Chalk up some hidden deaths there. Referrals for suspected cancer were also down by three quarters. Shall I bother the doctors now? It's probably nothing. I'll wait. More hidden deaths in the pipeline. As healthcare workers were diverted, children around the world missed out on vaccinations. More deaths will result from that as well.
It's not all bad news. The cleaner air from economic shutdowns, for example, has likely extended some lives. There are surely fewer road accidents during widespread lockdowns. But it seems clear that our lockdowns will result in a great deal of hidden harm. That harm is predictable. Indeed, it has been predicted. But somehow the hidden impacts just don't feel real until they start to happen. That's the identifiable victim effect.
Of course, lockdowns were always going to increase domestic violence. But when the news came through about a surge in calls to victim hotlines, it still felt somehow shocking. In countries which went for looser lockdowns, such hidden impacts loomed large in the reckoning.
The man behind Sweden's controversial choice to keep schools open, the country's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, explained that this was a public health decision, not an economic one. For disadvantaged children, schools might be the one good thing they have in life, but it's hard to keep focused on the hidden problems when the Covid death count is very visibly ticking upwards right in front of you. The Fukushima disaster has one last lesson to teach us.
Hidden tolls on mental health take time to play out. Fumio Okubo took his life the day he heard he was to be evacuated. Hamako Watanabe, a few months later. But others took longer to slip into a despair from which no escape seemed possible. The peak year for suicides wasn't 2011. It wasn't even 2012. It was 2013, two years after the disaster.
The Japanese medical researcher, Dr. Ochi, explained why. Initially, everyone was really determined, but they got tired. And that's when depression started to increase. As I record this, the world still seems determined to cope with the coronavirus. But our reserves of resolve will not be limitless. We'll get tired too.
In the end, the Japanese courts sided with the widower, Mikio Watanabe. They told Tepco to pay him nearly half a million dollars. They saw that hidden deaths matter, that indirect victims are just as deserving of our sympathy and support. We should remember that in the years to come.
To write this episode, we relied on original reporting from the BBC, the Financial Times and the New Yorker. As always, a full list of our sources is in the show notes on timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me, Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Pete Norton. The music, sound design and mixing are the work of Pascal Wise.
The scripts were edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maya Koenig, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary Tales is a Pushkin Industries production.
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So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.
To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.
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