I want to sing the praises of the Japanese in their efforts to manage catastrophes; the earthquake, the tsunami and the reactors.

Candidly, I have been watching as they try to manage the reactors and I believe that they have been as forthcoming as they can be and hopefully they will find a way to get things under control.

If you want to contribute to aid, I recommend the Red Cross whose Japanese partner is diligently working where the pain is most severe.

I bring up the crisis to ask the simple questions that should be part of any disaster recovery planning.

What happens if the control systems and their back up both fail? 

What can your sensor net tell you that you want to know if there no other tools to gather information?

What would you do if you had no way to reestablish connectivity?

How quickly could you redeploy and what would be effective?

At a grand level, disasters either force quarantine, evacuation or redeployment, which would be more devastating to your sensor net.

For the vendors who are reading this, which of these scenarios are in your sweet spot and how can you portray that information?

On the Smart Grid side, the lack of information has caused a few blackouts in the past as thresholds tripped a shut down which cascaded through the system. 

How can distributed computing teach us lessons that can be applied in a crisis?

I am not sure that clustering reactors is the smartest move, but I understand it.

I find it hard to condemn the technology based on disaster. I have been working on the Smart Grid summit and before this happened I was struck by how dirty our electrical generation methods currently are, so nuclear has a sense of logic to me. 

Let’s pray that Japan gets to return to managing based on the theory and not executing on the reality soon.