Proud. Prepared. Unstoppable.

What Have You Done Today to Make You Feel Proud? The lyrics of a song, right? For me, it will be forever a reminder of one of the proudest moments of my career.

It happened in 2011, when an earthquake struck 72km east of Japan in the Pacific Ocean. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the 4th most powerful earthquake recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900. The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami with waves that reached heights of up to 40.5 meters, which breached the defences at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. This caused the failure of the electrical grid and damaged the backup energy sources, which powered the cooling of the nuclear reactors. The snowball of disasters continued with a loss of containment and a release of radioactive contaminants into the environment.  It was regarded as the worst nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. All of this, I watched, with the rest of world, on the TV.

The following Saturday, I was contacted at home and requested to go into work and report to the Emergency Control Centre, where I was briefed, along with about twenty others, on the incident and that we were being asked to assist with the UK’s emergency response.

It was clear that the Japanese had a huge disaster to respond to and manage, including the evacuation of over 160,000 people.  The Japanese were asking for specialist equipment to help with their response. The task for us was to identify, marshall, check, load and transport monitoring and protective equipment  to Heathrow and onward shipment, to help in the recovery.

In total, 8 tonnes of equipment was dispatched to Japan.  This was done within 42 hours of the request being made,  which the Japanese said was a ‘phenomenal achievement’.

At the post-project review meeting, we were shown a video of the different stages of our response and what it had meant to the Japanese, and as the background music played, my tears of pride rolled down my cheeks, it was Heather Small, ‘Proud’. To this day, it makes me well-up on hearing it.

https://youtu.be/BLYQA5BtgG8

On that weekend, we made a difference during a crisis halfway around the world, one which never be forgotten.  

What’s been your proudest moment?