Disaster Preparation

Today's class about disaster preparedness got me thinking about Sophia University and its bureaucracy. I find it hard to believe that full-time professors have neither evacuation guides nor drill instructions that they can follow in case of an emergency. While I know that during class, many people made the point that it is the students' responsibility to know what they should do, I think that people are less likely to listen to one incredibly majime student than they are a professor with a loud voice and an inherent authority.

At the same time, after growing up in another earthquake-prone city thousands of miles away from here, I've also learned that it is incredibly easy to disregard emergency drills... or worse, an actual disaster. This is a trend that people in Miyagi have also been discussing as of late — the idea that we disregard warnings when we see absolutely no immediate personal danger. I think that if Sophia University were to start having emergency drills, people would ignore them out of the desire to maintain their studious, concentrated atmosphere and might not be able to move fast enough in the case of an actual disaster. The only way to get around this, however, is to take people by surprise.

Oh, and I definitely do not feel reassured about the fact that Building 2 is supposed to be a backup evacuation centre — those cracks in the wall made me wonder about just how stable the building truly is, and why the school has not invested the money to fix — and perhaps even reinforce — the structure.

Lastly, I think that the school should begin implementing randomly scheduled earthquake drills just to get people in the habit of knowing where to go. Sure, there is the possibility that the drills could become too frequent and the school would have a "boy who cried wolf" scenario on their hands, I think that it would be better than nothing. Even as a regular degree student, I would have had no idea where to go — those emergency maps are not as common as people make them out to be.

Overall though, it was a thoroughly informative and entertaining class.