Opinion

Evaluating Public Works

By DAVID ZOPPETTI

Ironically, it was right after the rainy season that Isahaya, Nagasaki Prefecture, was battered by torrential rains this year, suffering severe damage.

Residents were urged to evacuate their homes because of floods that partly destroyed crops, houses and furniture. Landslides blocked roads and forced trains to stop. One child even lost his life falling in the raging Honmyo River.

It was not the first time that Isahaya has faced such an ordeal. The region always gets tremendous amounts of rain and is located right on the edge of the Isahaya Bay lowlands (areas that are below sea level at high tide) facing the Ariake Sea. The Isahaya flood of 1957 left more than 500 people missing in its wake.

Two years ago, I spent a couple of weeks in Isahaya covering the completion of one of Japan's most ambiguous and heavily criticized public works project ever. Some of you might remember the scene: Hundreds of steel plates were dropped vertically into the ocean to complete the last portion of a 7-kilometer-long dike, cutting off a 3,550-hectare area of lowlands (known also as tidelands or wetlands) from the sea.

Officially, the aim of the project — which cost more than ¥237 billion — was to prevent disasters caused by high waves and flooding. But the Ariake Sea Dam has a more complex history.

The initial objective, set out in 1952, was the creation of land for local farmers. However a rice glut in the early '70s led to drastic reductions of farmland, making it unnecessary to reclaim the tidal flats for that reason.

Securing fresh water resources was proposed but quickly rejected as unnecessary. It was only then that the proponents conveniently remembered the inundation problems in the region and declared a new the objective: disaster prevention.

Aside from the huge sums of money invested in what was a very dubious project, environmentalists were worried about the fate of the rich local ecosystem in the Isahaya Bay wetlands. The symbol for their fight became the "mutsugoro." But the bay was also home to many other rare species and was known as one of Japan's largest and most beautiful bird sanctuaries.

All the controversy eventually led to one good thing. A bill was passed enabling the Environment Agency to conduct 5-year "time assessments" of public works projects to evaluate them before deciding their funding.

As Japan didn't have proper environmental assessment legislation at the time this was indeed a big step ahead. But shouldn't government projects also have to undergo follow-up surveys to verify that projects really serve the purpose for which they were designed?

Two years have passed since the construction of the Isahaya Bay Dam. But to this day no official evaluation of its impact has been conducted. Hearing about the damage caused by this year's precipitation, one feels legitimately entitled to question its efficiency as a flood disaster prevention device.

I believe that an objective survey of the situation with results made public is required if we want to learn from the past and avoid the situation in which public work projects become nothing more than a means for bureaucrats to pad ministry coffers with taxpayers' money.

Shukan ST: Aug. 27, 1999

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