This is an excellent presentation — The Magnitude 9.1 Meltdown at Fukushima | Nickolas Means | Monktoberfest 2023.
It’s a great review of what happened at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant after the quake in March 2011. But from an engineering management perspective, the presentation is also an excellent summary of what it takes for engineering managers to earn the respect of the engineers on the team. That’s critical. Because when a team is under stress — such as life threatening conditions that can affect tens of millions of people — it matters a lot that the team functions well. Watch the video for a lesson on team building and meritocracy.
I worked in Tokyo when the quake hit. It was a beautiful afternoon, actually. I was working on the 21st floor of the Sun Microsystems building in Setagaya, which shook violently for more than a half hour. I couldn’t stand well, really. I had to get on the floor. I didn’t realize how flexible steel buildings were! I thought for sure there would be massive failures in the structure given how much and how violently the building was moving. But it didn’t break. It just moved up and down and side to side and screeched like hell. The whipping was unreal.
In between aftershocks I started walking down 26 floors, which was challenging given the shaking. Some steel beams were exposed as the walls cracked and broke in the stairwells. At ground level looking up, I could easily see the building still moving even 30 mins after the first quake because there were many large aftershocks. There were no trains running so rather than just stand around I just walked home. That took 6 hours. I walked in silence with many thousands of people. I finally found a station with some buses running so I cut an hour off my trek home that way. No one in the queue for the bus said a word. And no one on the bus said a word. I think everyone knew what was really going on up north and how many people were now dead or dying and how many tens of thousands of families were ruined. But at that point I don’t think anyone really knew what was going on in the nuclear plant because that became more apparent the next morning. But everyone knows that Japan has nuclear plants all over the place on the coast so people generally are aware of the possibility of disaster from a big tsunami.
That was just the beginning, obviously, which is when this presentation above really starts. I remember the weeks and weeks of raw battles between the government, TEPCO, and the people trying to save the plant. The stakes couldn’t be higher given the population density in Tokyo 140 miles away. On the news, it was hard to tell who was right. But I’ve learned over the years to not trust the government or any large institution for any reason whatsoever, so I was more interested in the operations at ground level in the plant itself. The conflicts were palpable, though. Everyone worked and argued while thousands of aftershocks flowed freely throughout the country. Man, I think I felt those damn things for six months afterwards. It just became normal. I lived on Long Island during Three Mile Island, too. Hopefully no more of these catastrophic industrial accidents are in my future.
In the presentation, Nickolas Means talks about power and persuasion in terms of how things got done during the emergency at the plant. This is an important observation and one I’ve observed over the years as well. I’m a project manager and FOSS community builder (Linux, Java, Solaris), and I study technical people who build significant networks by contributing something of value to a project (code, content, expertise, etc). It’s the people who do the work who really earn leadership reputations — not the people who may have a fancy title at the top but who contribute very little to the team. That phenomenon was clear at Fukushima too, which Means documents in detail. Personally, I’ve seen this issue in software, biotechnology, publishing, and construction. It’s clear. But I’ve always wondered why the many management levels above can’t see it. It’s like looking at a blue sky. It’s just obvious, my goodness.