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Japan's Strict Building Codes Saved Lives PDF

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ARTIGOS DO NEW YORK TIMES SOBRE O TSUNAMI DO JAPÃO 2011 March 11, 2011 Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives By JAMES GLANZ and NORIMITSU ONISHI Hidden inside the skeletons of high-rise towers, extra steel bracing, giant rubber pads and embedded hydraulic shock absorbers make modern Japanese buildings among the sturdiest in the world during a major earthquake. And all along the Japanese coast, tsunami warning signs, towering seawalls and well- marked escape routes offer some protection from walls of water. These precautions, along with earthquake and tsunami drills that are routine for every Japanese citizen, show why Japan is the best-prepared country in the world for the twin disasters of earthquake and tsunami — practices that undoubtedly saved lives, though the final death toll is unknown. In Japan, where earthquakes are far more common than they are in the United States, the building codes have long been much more stringent on specific matters like how much a building may sway during a quake. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995, which killed about 6,000 people and injured 26,000, Japan also put enormous resources into new research on protecting structures, as well as retrofitting the country’s older and more vulnerable structures. Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis. Japan has gone much further than the United States in outfitting new buildings with advanced devices called base isolation pads and energy dissipation units to dampen the ground’s shaking during an earthquake. The isolation devices are essentially giant rubber-and-steel pads that are installed at the very bottom of the excavation for a building, which then simply sits on top of the pads. The dissipation units are built into a building’s structural skeleton. They are hydraulic cylinders that elongate and contract as the building sways, sapping the motion of energy. Of course, nothing is entirely foolproof. Structural engineers monitoring the events from a distance cautioned that the death toll was likely to rise as more information became available. Dr. Jack Moehle, a structural engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, said that video of the disaster seemed to show that some older buildings had indeed collapsed. The country that gave the world the word tsunami, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, built concrete seawalls in many communities, some as high as 40 feet, which amounted to its first line of defense against the water. In some coastal towns, in the event of an earthquake, networks of sensors are set up to set off 1 alarms in individual residences and automatically shut down floodgates to prevent waves from surging upriver. Critics of the seawalls say they are eyesores and bad for the environment. The seawalls, they say, can instill a false sense of security among coastal residents and discourage them from participating in regular evacuation drills. Moreover, by literally cutting residents’ visibility of the ocean, the seawalls reduce their ability to understand the sea by observing wave patterns, critics say. Waves from Friday’s tsunami spilled over some seawalls in the affected areas. “The tsunami roared over embankments in Sendai city, washing cars, houses and farm equipment inland before reversing directions and carrying them out to sea,” according to a statement by a Japanese engineer, Kit Miyamoto, circulated by the American Society of Civil Engineers. “Flames shot from some of the houses, probably because of burst gas pipes.” But Japan’s “massive public education program” could in the end have saved the most lives, said Rich Eisner, a retired tsunami preparedness expert who was attending a conference on the topic at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., on Friday. In one town, Ofunato, which was struck by a major tsunami in 1960, dozens of signs in Japanese and English mark escape routes, and emergency sirens are tested three times a day, Mr. Eisner said. Initial reports from Ofunato on Friday suggested that hundreds of homes had been swept away; the death toll was not yet known. But Matthew Francis of URS Corporation and a member of the civil engineering society’s tsunami subcommittee, said that education may have been the critical factor. “For a trained population, a matter of 5 or 10 minutes is all you may need to get to high ground,” Mr. Francis said. That would be in contrast to the much less experienced Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast. Reports in the Japanese news media indicate that people originally listed as missing in remote areas have been turning up in schools and community centers, suggesting that tsunami education and evacuation drills were indeed effective. Unlike Haiti, where shoddy construction vastly increased the death toll last year, or China, where failure to follow construction codes worsened the death toll in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Japan enforces some of the world’s most stringent building codes. Japanese buildings tend to be much stiffer and stouter than similar structures in earthquake-prone areas in California as well, said Mr. Moehle, the Berkeley engineer: Japan’s building code allows for roughly half as much sway back and forth at the top of a high rise during a major quake. 2 The difference, Mr. Moehle said, comes about because the United States standard is focused on preventing collapse, while in Japan — with many more earthquakes — the goal is to prevent any major damage to the buildings because of the swaying. New apartment and office developments in Japan flaunt their seismic resistance as a marketing technique, a fact that has accelerated the use of the latest technologies, said Ronald O. Hamburger, a structural engineer in the civil engineering society and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, a San Francisco engineering firm. “You can increase the rents by providing a sort of warranty — ‘If you locate here you’ll be safe,’ ” Mr. Hamburger said. Although many older buildings in Japan have been retrofitted with new bracing since the Kobe quake, there are many rural residences of older construction that are made of very light wood that would be highly vulnerable to damage. The fate of many of those residences is still unknown. Mr. Miyamoto, the Japanese engineer, described a nation in chaos as the quake also damaged or disabled many elements of the transportation system. He said that he and his family were on a train near the Ikebukuro station when the earthquake struck. Writing at 1:30 a.m., he said that “we are still not far from where the train stopped.” “Japan Railway actually closed down the stations and sent out all commuters into the cold night,” he said. “They announced that they are concerned about structural safety. Continuous aftershocks make me feel like car sickness as my family and I walk on the train tracks.” James Glanz reported from New York, and Norimitsu Onishi from Jakarta, Indonesia. March 13, 2011 For Neighbor of Stricken Nuclear Plant, Second Thoughts About a Centerpiece By MICHAEL WINES ¶ KORIYAMA, Japan — When the earthquake and tsunami struck Friday, Kumiko Fukaya ignored the evacuation order that afternoon and instead gathered up her teenage son and daughter, her mother and her older sister. Afraid to sleep in the house, they spent the night in her blue 2010 Toyota hatchback. ¶ When loudspeakers throughout the town blared another call for evacuation at 7:30 a.m. Saturday — this time citing problems at nuclear reactors just a few miles from her home — she was skeptical. ¶ “I didn’t think it was a big deal,” said Ms. Fukaya, 48. “I thought, ‘Maybe I should stay.’ ” 3 ¶ One of the crippled plants, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, is 12 miles north of Ms. Fukaya’s hometown, Tomioka. The other troubled plant, Daini, is just three miles to the south. ¶ By 8 a.m., Ms. Fukaya said, Tomioka’s narrow streets were jammed with cars in orderly retreat. She loaded her family into the Toyota, spent an hour hunting for gasoline, went to a school for a radiation check and then drove 37 miles west, arriving at Koriyama Kita Technical High School, where about 70 refugees were gathered in a makeshift evacuation center in the gymnasium. ¶ Now, Ms. Fukaya says she was lulled into a sense of false complacency by the absence of past problems at the nuclear complex. ¶ “The entire town was enriched by Tokyo Power,” she said. “I thought they picked a safe and secure location. So instead of opposing the nuclear plant, I felt more security. ¶ “Now I realize it’s a scary thing. But if the town recovers without the nuclear plant, the town has nothing special. If based on this experience they build a stronger and safer facility, I may return.” ¶ If she is allowed to. ¶ “There’s no information,” Ms. Fukaya said. “Nobody knows. It could be years. It could be months.” ¶ Yamada Koichi, 49, who teaches English at the school, was helping the refugees. A burly man with a broad smile and a shock of graying hair, he bantered cheerily about the town’s donations, describing who had given blankets and space heaters. He noted wryly that, earthquake or no earthquake, anxious parents were demanding that he finish the high school entrance exams he was grading when the temblor struck. ¶ “There is a saying in Japan,” Mr. Koichi said. “If you think you can do it, then you can do it.” ¶ Then he was asked about his family. ¶ “I am from Miyakogi village,” he said, a seaside hamlet north of the Daiichi reactor. Although he lives in Koriyama with his wife and daughter, his 80-year-old father and 76-year-old mother live in his childhood home, about a mile from the beach. ¶ Mr. Koichi has heard nothing from them since the earthquake. It is too dangerous, he said, to go back and look for them. ¶ “Maybe my home is gone,” he said. His face crumpled, and he covered his eyes with his hand. “We have no information because the mobile service is not good. We don’t know whether they are alive or dead.” March 13, 2011 4 Second Explosion at Reactor as Technicians Try to Contain Damage By HIROKO TABUCHI and MATTHEW L. WALD ¶ TOKYO — A second explosion rocked a troubled nuclear power plant Monday, blowing the roof off a containment building but not harming the reactor, Japanese nuclear officials announced on public television. ¶ The explosion underscores the difficulties Japanese authorities are having in bringing several stricken reactors under control three days after a massive earthquake and a tsunami hit Japan’s northeast coast and shut down the electricity that runs the crucial cooling systems for reactors. ¶ Operators fear that if they cannot establish control, despite increasingly desperate measures to do so, the reactors could experience full meltdowns, which would release catastrophic amounts of radiation. ¶ It was unclear if radiation was released by the explosion, but a similar explosion at another reactor at the plant over the weekend did release radioactive material. ¶ Live footage on public broadcaster NHK showed thick smoke rising from the building. ¶ Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said that the release of large amounts of radiation was unlikely. But traces of radiation could be released into the atmosphere, and 600 people who remained within a 12 mile radius have been ordered to take cover indoors, he said. ¶ The country’s nuclear power watchdog said readings taken soon after the explosion showed no big change in radiation levels around the plant or any damage to the containment vessel, which protects the radioactive material in the reactor. ¶ “I have received reports that the containment vessel is sound,” Mr. Edano said. “I understand that there is little possibility that radioactive materials are being released in large amounts.” ¶ In screenings, higher-than-normal levels of radiation have been detected from 22 people evacuated from near the plant, the nuclear safety watchdog said, but it is not clear if the doses they received were dangerous. ¶ Technicians had been scrambling most of Sunday to fix a mechanical failure that left the reactor far more vulnerable to explosions. ¶ The two reactors where the explosions occurred are both presumed to have already suffered partial meltdowns — a dangerous situation that, if unchecked, could lead to a full meltdown. ¶ The reactors are both at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, where another reactor is also having difficulties. 5 ¶ The Fukushima Daiichi plant and the Fukushima Daini power station, about 10 miles away, have been under a state of emergency. ¶ On Monday morning, Tokyo Electric, which runs both plants, said it had restored the cooling systems at two of three reactors experiencing problems at Daini. That would leave a total of four reactors at the two plants with pumping difficulties. ¶ “I’m not aware that we’ve ever had more than one reactor troubled at a time,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton, explaining the difficulties faced by the Japanese. ¶ “The whole country was focused on Three Mile Island,” he said, referring to the Pennsylvania nuclear plant accident in 1979. “Here you have Tokyo Electric Power and the Japanese regulators focusing on multiple plants at the same time.”“ ¶ In what was perhaps the clearest sign of the rising anxiety over the nuclear crisis, both the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Russian authorities issued statements on Sunday trying to allay fears, saying they did not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach their territory. ¶ Late Sunday night, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Japan had added a third plant, Onagawa, to the list of those under a state of emergency because a low level of radioactive materials had been detected outside its walls. But on Monday morning, it quoted Japanese authorities as saying that the radioactivity levels at the Onagawa plant had returned to normal levels and that there appeared to be no leak there. ¶ “The increased level may have been due to a release of radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,” the agency said. The Onagawa and Daiichi plants are 75 miles apart. The operator of the Onagawa plant, Tohoku Electric Power, said that levels of radiation there were twice the allowed level, but that they did not pose health risks. ¶ Soon after that announcement, Kyodo News reported that a plant about 75 miles north of Tokyo was having at least some cooling system problems. But a plant spokesman later said a backup pump was working. ¶ The government was testing people who lived near the Daiichi plant, with local officials saying that about 170 residents had probably been exposed. The government earlier said that three workers had radiation illness, but Tokyo Electric said Monday that only one worker was ill. ¶ The problems at Fukushima Daiichi appeared to be the most serious involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster. A partial meltdown can occur when radioactive fuel rods, which normally are covered in water, remain partially uncovered for too long. The more the fuel is exposed, the closer the reactor comes to a full meltdown. 6 ¶ Technicians are essentially fighting for time while heat generation in the fuel gradually declines, trying to keep the rods covered despite a breakdown in the normal cooling system, which runs off the electrical grid. Since that was knocked out in the earthquake, and diesel generators later failed — possibly because of the tsunami — the operators have used a makeshift system for keeping cool water on the fuel rods. ¶ Now, they pump in new water, let it boil and then vent it to the atmosphere, releasing some radioactive material. But they are having difficulty even with that, and have sometimes allowed the water levels to drop too low, exposing the fuel to steam and air, with resulting fuel damage. ¶ On Sunday, Japanese nuclear officials said operators at the plant had suffered a setback trying to bring one of the reactors under control when a valve malfunction stopped the flow of water and left fuel rods partially uncovered. The delay raised pressure at the reactor. ¶ At a late-night news conference, officials at Tokyo Electric Power said that the valve had been fixed, but that water levels had not yet begun rising. ¶Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Tokyo, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Michael Wines contributed reporting from Koriyama, Japan, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. March 13, 2011 Residents Who Escaped Return to See What, if Anything, Is Left of Their Lives By MARTIN FACKLER NATORI, Japan — One couple rode out the tsunami on top of an irrigation tower, crammed in with three other people. A man had to abandon his car in a field and run for it. Another couple simply got lucky, riding out the torrents in their house, one of the few in a swath of destruction that inexplicably held together. They began streaming back to this stricken rice farming town on Monday morning, long lines of people returning to see what, if anything, was left of their lives after the waves came. They walked slowly, gazing in bewilderment at a scene that they could only struggle to comprehend. Officials said the death toll in Friday’s tsunami was certain to exceed 10,000. But even that seemed conservative — a leading Japanese daily reported Monday that 20,000 people in two small coastal towns were missing. Many returning here Monday were in tears. One couple said between sobs that they were trying to find their elderly mother, whom they had been forced to leave behind. There were many older people in the area, residents said, and many of them were trapped in their houses. 7 Until last week, Natori’s farmers had tilled fields of rice in the summer and, in the winter, vegetables in neat white rows of plastic greenhouses, fields that most of the world saw inundated on Friday by a wall of water, mud, cars and wooden debris. The devastation extends miles inland, so much so that even some evacuation centers were reportedly engulfed. In satellite images, Natori and nearby Yuriage, just south of the battered city of Sendai, seem to have been swept away without a trace, as if a giant razor had shaved the earth clean. Kayo Miura said she was upstairs at her house when the earthquake struck, knocking her off her feet. She turned on the radio and heard a tsunami alert, but she had heard those before and nothing had come of them. After all, she thought, the house was almost two miles from the beach. About 20 to 30 minutes later, she said, she saw a line of cars on her field. “Why are those cars parked in the field?” she wondered. Then she saw them moving, heard screams about a tsunami coming and froze. Her husband, Ken, ran upstairs just as the waves hit. Inexplicably, in an area where virtually every house was destroyed, theirs held together. Others told harrowing tales of escape. When Naoko Takahashi, 60, and her husband, Hiromichi, 64, saw a jumble of cars and burning fuel bearing down on them, they ran as fast as they could, but the menacing wall kept gaining. Not sure what to do, they caught sight of an irrigation tower that was 12 to 15 feet high and scrambled up just in time, joining two others in riding out the flood. “The only reason we made it were some earthen walls that slowed the water just enough,” Mr. Takahashi said. “They gave us a few seconds.” They made their way home after dark, they said, wading through water that was up to their armpits while fires burned all around. The next day, some soldiers came and took them to a shelter. As they got home, Ms. Takahashi turned to her husband and said: “Look, there’s our house. What is that boat?” Indeed, there was a fishing boat sitting in a rice paddy to the side of their house. The gloom was occasionally pierced by a ray of humor, of the gallows sort. Ko Miura, 56, a wholesaler, said he tried to drive home after the quake. But he was driving parallel to the wave, so he was forced to abandon his car and run. He just managed to get to a highway overpass before the waters swept by. When he looked up, he said, he saw his car float by. The immediate future for Natori and its residents is undoubtedly grim. Rescue workers have been hampered by quake-damaged roads and debris, enormous traffic jams and fuel shortages. After a spell of relatively mild weather, temperatures were dropping and snow was in the forecast. And even as people picked through what little was left in the rubble, the fires continued to burn. 8 March 13, 2011 Seawalls Offered Little Protection Against Tsunami’s Crushing Waves By NORIMITSU ONISHI JAKARTA, Indonesia — At least 40 percent of Japan’s 22,000-mile coastline is lined with concrete seawalls, breakwaters or other structures meant to protect the country against high waves, typhoons or even tsunamis. They are as much a part of Japan’s coastal scenery as beaches or fishing boats, especially in areas where the government estimates the possibility of a major earthquake occurring in the next three decades at more than 90 percent, like the northern stretch that was devastated by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami. Along with developing quake-resistant buildings, the coastal infrastructure represents postwar Japan’s major initiative against earthquakes and tsunamis. But while experts have praised Japan’s rigorous building codes and quake-resistant buildings for limiting the number of casualties from Friday’s earthquake, the devastation in coastal areas and a final death toll predicted to exceed 10,000 could push Japan to redesign its seawalls — or reconsider its heavy reliance on them altogether. The risks of dependence on seawalls were most evident in the crisis at the Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants, both located along the coast close to the earthquake zone. The tsunami that followed the quake washed over walls that were supposed to protect the plants, disabling the diesel generators crucial to maintaining power for the reactors’ cooling systems during shutdown. Cooling system malfunctions caused overheating and partial fuel meltdowns at two reactors at the Daiichi plant, becoming Japan’s worst nuclear accident. Peter Yanev, one of the world’s best-known consultants on designing nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes, said the seawalls at the Japanese plants probably could not handle tsunami waves of the height that struck them. And the diesel generators were situated in a low spot on the assumption that the walls were high enough to protect against any likely tsunami. That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The tsunami walls either should have been built higher, or the generators should have been placed on higher ground to withstand potential flooding, he said. Increasing the height of tsunami walls, he said, is the obvious answer in the immediate term. “The cost is peanuts compared to what is happening,” Mr. Yanev said. Some critics have long argued that the construction of seawalls was a mistaken, hubristic effort to control nature as well as the kind of wasteful public works project that successive Japanese governments used to 9 reward politically connected companies in flush times and to try to kick-start a stagnant economy. Supporters, though, have said the seawalls increased the odds of survival in a quake-prone country, where a mountainous interior has historically pushed people to live along its coastline. A fuller picture of how seawalls protected or failed to protect areas beyond the nuclear plants will not emerge for at least a few more days. But reports from affected areas indicate that waves simply washed over seawalls, some of which collapsed. Even in the two cities with seawalls built specifically to withstand tsunamis, Ofunato and Kamaishi, the tsunami crashed over before moving a few miles inland, carrying houses and cars with it. In Kamaishi, 14-foot waves surmounted the seawall — the world’s largest, erected a few years ago in the city’s harbor at a depth of 209 feet, a length of 1.2 miles and a cost of $1.5 billion — and eventually submerged the city center. “This is going to force us to rethink our strategy,” said Yoshiaki Kawata, a specialist on disaster management at Kansai University in Osaka and the director of a disaster prevention center in Kobe. “This kind of hardware just isn’t effective.” Mr. Kawata said that antitsunami seawalls were “costly public works projects” that Japan could no longer afford. “The seawalls did reduce the force of the tsunami, but it was so big that it didn’t translate into a reduction in damage,” he said, adding that resources would be better spent on increasing evacuation education and drills. Gerald Galloway, a research professor of engineering at the University of Maryland, said one problem with physical defenses protecting vulnerable areas was that they could create a sense of complacency. “There are challenges in telling people they are safe” when the risks remain, he said. Whatever humans build, nature has a way of overcoming it. Mr. Galloway noted that New Orleans is getting a substantial upgrade of its hurricane protection system, but he said, “If all the new levees were in and we had a Katrina times two, a lot of people are going to still get wet.” Similarly, he said, some of the floodwalls in Japan, which can be almost 40 feet high, but vary from place to place, were simply too low for the wave. “If a little bit dribbles over the top, you get a little wet inside,” he said. “If it’s a massive amount, then you get buildings washed away.” Some Japanese experts said the seawalls may have played a useful role in this crisis. “This time, almost everybody tried to flee, but many didn’t succeed in fleeing,” said Shigeo Takahashi, a researcher at the Asia-Pacific Center for Coastal Disaster Research in Yokosuka. “But because of the 10

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.