Japan Quake Readiness Still Issue 10 Yrs After Kobe
Date: 17-Jan-05
Country: JAPAN
Author: Masayuki Kitano
The government and many localities are better prepared to avoid the immediate chaos that raised Kobe's death toll but progress on preventative steps to lessen the physical impact of a major quake has been slow, experts say.
"What hurts the most is that proper steps have not been taken in the area of how to reduce damage, because the focus has been on steps to be taken after an earthquake," said Hajime Kagiya, a former director of disaster prevention in a district of Tokyo.
"I feel as if 10 years have been wasted."
That lament resonates even more loudly after the huge tsunami that struck Indian Ocean shores on Dec. 26 without warning, killing more than 162,000 and leaving millions homeless.
The 7.3-magnitude Kobe quake, Japan's worst disaster in half a century, hit at 5:46 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1995, killing 6,433 people, forcing more than 300,000 to take refuge and destroying homes, factories, roads and railways.
The damage bill totalled about $100 billion, making it by some estimates the costliest natural catastrophe in history.
Japanese authorities came under heavy criticism after the quake for their sluggish and confused response.
Failure to regulate traffic meant clogged streets prevented fire engines from getting through, and the central government was slow to set up a crisis centre in Tokyo and deploy the military.
Government crisis management, at least, has improved.
Army commanders can now order the dispatch of units without waiting for a formal request from local authorities, while a disaster task force headed by the prime minister can issue orders to local authorities and gather information more swiftly.
But wide disparities exist among towns and cities.
"I think that gaps have grown much wider after the Kobe earthquake," said Itsuki Nakabayashi, a Tokyo Metropolitan University professor who specialises in urban planning and disaster mitigation. "Overall, major cities are ahead while smaller municipalities have fallen behind."
REDUCING THE DAMAGE
That said, a recent study predicted that the mega-metropolis of Tokyo with its regional population of 35 million would be the worst hit of the world's big cities if struck by a huge quake.
"Today, a severe earthquake in the Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation would result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities, damages running into trillions of dollars, and global economic repercussions," said a report by German reinsurer Munich Re.
In part, a sense of complacency is at fault, the study said.
"...Megacities in industrialised countries mostly have good safety systems in place. But this supposed safety can in fact be dangerous, lulling people into a false sense of security and leading to less sensitivity to risks," the report added.
Elsewhere in Japan, many local governments have made little effort to reduce the damage that would occur if a quake struck.
A media survey this month showed that 371 local governments out of 672 that responded had not made substantive preparations for a quick response or taken preventive steps to limit damage.
Vital steps such as improving the quake resistance of houses have been slow, largely because of the cost and a lack of sense of urgency, despite the frequency of earthquakes in a country that accounts for 20 percent of the world's seismic activity.
"People don't feel that the convenience of their everyday lives are affected" by whether or not they make repairs to strengthen earthquake resistance, Nakabayashi said.
One in four houses in Japan are likely too weak to withstand major quakes, according to a recent government survey.
While a system was begun in 2002 for the government and municipalities to help fund such home upgrades, less than a tenth of municipalities, many of which are facing budget constraints, actually employ the system.
Japan's famed concrete breakwaters to fend off killer tsunamis also may not be as effective as many had