by Alan Greenblatt
Kit Miyamoto was riding on a train in Tokyo on Friday when a massive earthquake struck off the Japanese coast. Although the earthquake's epicenter was hundreds of miles away, the train came to an immediate halt. Rather than panicking, Miyamoto recognized that the sudden stop represented an attempt to protect against loss of life. "As soon as the train feels an earthquake of any magnitude, it stops so you will not get derailed," Miyamoto says. "This is the Japanese alarm system at its best." Because of a long history of frequent, sizable earthquakes, Japan was relatively well-prepared for the latest quake. Japan could not protect its entire coastline against tsunami with its system of seawalls. And with sizable aftershocks still occurring, the final death toll will not be known for some time. But it will be a fraction of the 230,000 deaths seen in Haiti following last year's earthquake. That's in spite of the fact that the Port-au-Prince earthquake was far smaller in magnitude than Friday's, which was 8.9 — one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. "The biggest difference between a place like Haiti and Japan is that in Japan, they experience earthquakes frequently and they build the habits of a high level of earthquake technology into their engineering," says Miyamoto, who is president of a structural engineering firm based in California. Read More
Expecting To Be Saved Mary Lou Zoback, an earthquake risk consultant in California, worries that preparedness is not a strong enough part of American culture — for disasters of any kind. Retrofitting a home to be better able to withstand an earthquake would probably cost people less money than granite countertops for the kitchen, she says. Yet many people choose aesthetics over safety...
The Limits of Safeguards and Human Foresight Here's the truly scary thing about the 8.9-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Honshu Island and its resulting tsunami: Japan is a country that is lauded for doing preparedness right...
Why America Isn't Ready for a Disaster
