It hap­pens with­out warn­ing: One minute all is “nor­mal” in the world and the next minute disaster.

On the morn­ing of March 11, a 23-foot wall of water slammed into the Japanese coast and dev­as­tated the city of Sendai. An 8.9-magnitude earth­quake, the largest to ever strike Japan, caused a mas­sive tsunami that has killed more than 1,800 peo­ple and injured more than 1,900 people.

The death toll con­tin­ues to rise as res­cue crews con­tin­u­ously search for sur­vivors. The Japanese gov­ern­ment reported that 2,369 peo­ple are still miss­ing accord­ing to CNN.

The Sendai air­port has been com­pletely destroyed. Houses, build­ings, roads and rail­ways have been destroyed or severely dam­aged. An esti­mated 4.4 mil­lion homes were left with­out power and 1.4 mil­lion have no water. According to the World Reporter, the esti­mated eco­nomic loss is approx­i­mately $170 bil­lion just to the region that was hit by the tsunami.

Imagine watch­ing your home being washed away by a wall of water and being left with noth­ing. Imagine los­ing many fam­ily mem­bers and friends on the same day with­out warn­ing. How would you cope with such a tremen­dous loss?

For thou­sands of peo­ple in Japan this is now their world. The worst, how­ever, may not be over. The earth­quake and ensu­ing tsunami dam­aged three nuclear power plants. One of the plant’s cool­ing sys­tems was affected and has caused the plant to over­heat and release radioac­tive steam into the atmosphere.

In a time of tragedy, the respon­si­bil­ity to help the griev­ing nation rebuild lies on the shoul­ders of other nations. Japan has a very sta­ble econ­omy, but large parts of its infra­struc­ture were destroyed in the nat­ural dis­as­ter. It will not be able to fully recover with­out our help.

The U.S. and other afflu­ent nations should reach out and sup­port Japan in this time of cri­sis. It was only six years ago that New Orleans and the Gulf coast were dev­as­tated by Hurricane Katrina. n