The great wall of Japan
Japan is building a 400km chain of cement seawalls up to five stories high to protect the country against future tsunamis, reports buzzfeed.com.
The project hopes to stop a repeat of the devastating March 2011 tsunami that killed about 19,000 people, destroyed much of Japan’s northeastern coast, and led to the Fukushima nuclear disasters.
The government had announced the plan, which was later nicknamed “The Great Wall of Japan” by detractors, a few months after the tsunami, according to the Guardian. The wall is estimat- ed to cost at least $6.8 billion and construction has already begun in the worst-hit areas. It would be made out of cement and actually be composed of a chain of smaller sea walls to make construction easier.
There is, however, much debate in Japan about whether the plan is good value for money.
Last year Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife Akie Abe had said she was against the idea and suggested that other solutions to Japan’s tsunami problem could be found.
“Please do not proceed, even if it’s already decided,” she told an audience in New York City last September. “I ask, is building high sea walls to shield the coast line really, really the best?” Others worry it may not be effective. “The safest thing is for people to live on higher ground and for people’s homes and their workplaces to be in separate locations. If we do that, we don’t need to have a ‘Great Wall,”’ Tsuneaki Iguchi, who was mayor of Iwanuma, a town inundated in the most recent major tsunami, told the AP news agency.
The wall is estimated to cost at least $6.8 billion