Japan's Strict Building Codes Saved Lives

125 Pages·2013·0.97 MB·English

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
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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.
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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.’ ”
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¶ 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
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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.
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¶ 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.
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¶ 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.
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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.
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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
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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
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