Kobe Earthquake Case Study PDF

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Kobe, Japan earthquake 1995 – Case Study 1. The nature of the hazards facing Kobe and the nature of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake. Kobe is the sixth-largest city in Japan and is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture. It is located on the southern side of the main island of Honshu. Kobe had a population of 1.5 million, the second largest populated city in Japan. The earthquake in 1995 – also known as the Great Hanshin earthquake struck at 5:46 a.m., on Tuesday, January 17th, 1995. It was a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter Scale and the Epicentre was on Awaji Island. The ground shook for only 20 seconds. The earthquake occurred on the Nojima fault, which is a common area of earthquake because of the friction resulting from the two plates colliding along this destructive margin. Three plates meet near to the coast if Japan, close to Kobe. The denser oceanic Philippines Plate was being pushed beneath the lighter continental Eurasian Plate. The shallow depth of the focus which was only 16kms below the surface and the fact that the epicentre occurred close to a densely populated area made it more destructive. The shallow focus and the epicentre close to Kobe, meant that the energy of the seismic waves was much stronger, increasing vulnerability. Seismic shockwaves travelled from Awaii Island (the epicentre) along the Nojima Fault to the cities of Kobe and Osaka. A strike slip fault is a fault zone where two blocks of land move horizontally rather than vertically along a fault plane. These faults can form between two small blocks of land or crustal plates. They also sometimes develop within a continental plate. Primary Hazards / Impacts:  The ground motion was vertical and horizontal shaking occurring simultaneously and shook for 20 seconds.  The earthquake struck early in the morning so people were getting up and making breakfast. Therefore cookers, sparking electric wires and hot embers from fires very quickly started over 300 fires, due to people cooking meals at the moment that their homes began to shake and collapse. 500 deaths were due to fires and almost 700 buildings were destroyed.  The collapse of the electricity and telephone systems made it impossible for people to let the fire teams know where they were needed, whilst the broken water pipes and blocked roads made it hard for fire teams to reach and put out fires.  As buildings collapses and the ground shook, many of the poles also collapsed, cutting of the electricity supply not just to homes, but police stations, hospitals and fire stations too.  The high-speed railway link from Tokoyo, and the whole of western Japan, was cut in half when the bridges in Kobe fell down. The only other two rail links were also cut during the quake. As the shockwaves passed under the supports of the raised motorway, the ground gave way and large sections of the road collapsed in three parts of the city. One section of the road that collapsed was over half a km long.  More than 102,000 buildings were destroyed in Kobe (especially the older wooden buildings), leaving over a fifth of the city population, 300,00 people were left homeless.  6000 died in the quake and 35 000 people were injured.  82% of schools were damaged.  12% of industry destroyed. Secondary Hazards / Impacts:  ¾ of the water supply across the entire city was out of action, gas pipes leaked gas into the air and sewers discharged their contents into the streets.  The Central part of Kobe, including the main docks and port area, is built on soft and easily moved rocks, especially the port itself, which is built on reclaimed ground. Here the ground liquefied and

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acted like thick soup, allowing buildings to topple sideways, resulting in the huge cranes in the harbor toppling the sea. Estimated 80 billion pounds cost of damage.

How well prepared were Kobe before the earthquake? The Japanese felt that they were well prepared for earthquakes given their research into the hazard and the wealth of the country which had enabled them to spend money on several forms of risk management. - However, there was an illusion of preparedness among the people and the city authorities and that they were caught unaware by the severity of the event. - There were still too many older traditional houses in the city. Many of these had heavy tiles on the roof but these tiles killed and injured many people when the supports collapsed. Many houses were not retrofitted, along with much of the transport infrastructure. - Kobe also had not experienced a serious earthquake for 400 years, the people and the authorities had not maintained sufficient emergency supplies. - Many have accused the Japanese government of poorly managing the aftermath of the event. People were more vulnerable to the event by being slow to react to the scale of it, by not encouraging enough community volunteers and by refusing offers of help from foreign government.

2. Discuss how the impacts of the hazard were affected by the community’s responses to hazard risk.

Short / Mid-term Responses  Electric power, gas, water, telecommunications and major road and rail links were restored within months of the event.  Within several months, 48 000 housing units had been supplies to take care of the homeless who made up 20% of the city’s population after the event.  70% of the port operations were restored within one year.  Almost all of the debris resulting from the event was successfully removed within a short time, with 60% of it successfully re-used in landfill sites.  15 months after the event, manufacturing output of the Kobe region was up to 96% of what it had been before the earthquake. Longer term Responses – Building resilience and adaptability On the 29th of January, Kobe’s mayor gave a statement on his vision for the future of the city ‘to build a disaster-safe model city where citizens can live and work in a safe and secure manner through the swift recovery of the urban infrastructure, civic life and urban development’ and to ‘create a new Kobe that will become a civic minded creative city interacting with the world’. The recovery process would be started under those principles in order to bring back the city to a normal state but also bring the city forward. The reconstruction of Kobe was to use a long – term recovery to build a creative and resilient, which was based on three major recovery categories:  A physical recovery = by reconstructing infrastructures and planning operations of urban development  An economic recovery = through revitalization of the economy and the support to small businesses  A social recovery = with the reconstruction of new houses and the restoration of livelihoods. RECOVERY OF THE LOCAL ECONOMY: The recovery of the local economy was based on three phases: Relief, Recovery and New Developments. Hyogo Prefecture (a region in Japan which had Kobe as a city within), offered 304.1 billion yen, and Kobe offered 118, 1 billion yen through the emergency disaster relief found. A total of 422, 2 billion yen was

offered and the national government provided half of it. The fund was aimed at restoring small and medium – sized companies that were victims of the earthquake.  The government assigned temporary buildings to firms to start up their operations.  In 1996, Kobe decided to promote the construction of permanent factories to rent in order to increase the development of the area and to help local small and medium sized industries.  As well as the construction of factories to rent, the government decided to build a number of faculties to support firms’ business. COMMUNITY:  The local community was engaged in the reconstruction process. In some case, local community promotes projects for restoring buildings and streets, demonstrating the power of social capital and the need of ties in communities. Mano, a neighbourhood in Nagata district organized several projects dedicated to the reconstruction, activating public event and creating 16 local organizations involved in the reconstruction. Compared to other areas, Mano has known a faster recovery, reasonably due to the power of social capital.  A new strategy was promoted in order to improve attractiveness and of the city through the creative sector, particularly in design activities. Such strategy wanted to favour tourism, well-being and sustainable development through three design perspectives: town design, life design and manufacturing design. Such strategy highlights the importance of the community for the local development: the idea to use creativity to promote the city aimed both at revitalizing the economy and creating a comfortable place to live.  Due to the massive voluntary action and the role of local communities in supporting projects for reconstruction, the national government recognized the importance of voluntary action in recovery in order to rebuild communities both in physical and psychological way. As a consequence, a law to recognize legal personality to Non – Profit organizations (NGO’s) was passed by the government of Japan in 1998. LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE EARTHQUAKE AND ITS AFTERMATH:  About 70% of the people in the earthquake that lost their lives were due to the collapse of buildings. Therefore, the innovation in seismic technology related to earthquakes is crucial to reduce human losses. As a result, local government provided the adoption of new standard law for aseismic constructions under the belief that physical reconstruction is an essential phase of in the reconstruction process: safety in homes and workplaces is a way to the regain psychological stability after the quake.  Improve the fire-fighting capacity: as a vast number of buildings were damaged in the fires that followed the earthquake, the city council is determines to explore all possible sources for extinguishing future fires, including rivers and the sea.  Protecting lifelines: Back-up systems must be put into place wherever possible, despite the cost. With telecommunications, for example, they have constructed a duplicate fibre optic system.  Community participation: the city council now understands that in order to reduce future risks, the community needs to be better informed through awareness and education programmes. Areas of concern revealed by the disaster included the stockpiling of resources in readiness for an event, the ability of ordinary people to fight fires and the availability of basic tools for search and rescue.  The city council also encourages a range of NGO’s, as they seemed flexible during the event in a way that official bodies were not.  Disaster-resistant measures: a variety of measures has been proposed which would protect people from the effects of earthquakes, fires, landslides and typhoons. These include firebreakers to be established along rivers and roadways, a mountain greenbelt in order to reduce landslides, a new canal system to ensure reliable water supply and back up systems for hospitals. Overall, immediate / med-term repsonses were to bring the city up to equilibrium. This came from emergency management, reconstruction and monetary and humanitarian aid. In the long term, the

governments strategy was to be based on creativity, innovation, to improve the standards, perception and resilience of the people....