Quakes and wars shake in new year

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

2024 has started tragically for Japan, with a series of earthquakes up to a magnitude of 7.6 striking the west coast of its main island on New Year’s Day that left 55 dead, sparked infernos amid destroyed buildings and led to tsunami warnings that were later lifted. Emergency services and army personnel are in a race against time to find survivors among the rubble.

Then a Coastguard earthquake relief aircraft about to depart from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport collided with a Japan Airlines jet coming into land on Wednesday night, killing five of the six people on board. All 379 passengers and crew on the Airbus A350 managed to escape down inflatable slides before it was engulfed in flames.

The big quakes will have brought memories and anxiety flooding back from the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 that killed about 20,000 people. That 9.0 underwater megathrust earthquake and the 15m tsunami it caused also triggered a major nuclear accident at the Fukushima No.1 power plant.

In the hours after Monday’s quakes there was concern over damage to nuclear plants on the Sea of Japan coast — which mainly amounted to a fire extinguishing system being activated at one reactor, partially disabling its electricity supply. Many of these plants have been offline since 2011, but Japan’s government plans to ramp up their use and commission new plants as part of its “green transformation” policy.

Meanwhile three major wars rage elsewhere in the world, with seemingly no end in sight.

Israel has expanded its ground offensive into Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza in recent days, and took its battle against Hamas to Lebanon also with a drone strike in southern Beirut that killed its deputy political leader along with two Hamas military commanders and four other members.

Ukrainians have started the new year under some of the heaviest aerial bombardments since Russia’s war began nearly two years ago. It hit back with attacks on the Russian city of Belgorod that left 25 dead. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin vowed to “intensify” attacks on Ukraine.

In Sudan 7 million people have fled their homes since a civil war erupted in April. More than 12,000 have been killed, with war crimes alleged against both sides and ethnic cleansing by the RSF and its allies. It is the world’s largest human displacement crisis and the UN has warned of “catastrophic hunger” by May unless more food gets into war-wracked areas.

It is a sad truth that Sudan’s needs are competing with the crises in Ukraine and Gaza. The UN says it has received just 39 percent of the $2.6bn it needs for its response, with about half of that coming from the United States — which is also trying to mediate between the warring sides.