Kobe Earthquake 17 Jan 1995

A Personal Perspective (at 20/2/95)

The earthquake that hit Kobe on 17th January caused severe damage to the city and the surrounding areas. Hundreds of buildings collapsed, roads cracked, bridges were destroyed, there were several landslips, and water, power and telephone lines were severed. As part of an EEFIT team I visited the city a few days after the earthquake.

I had thought that all the news reports had prepared me for the extent of the damage but only when I was standing in the midst of 10,000m2 of ashes and twisted metal did the scale of the disaster really hit me. So many people died and the cost of rebuilding is so large, an estimated £200 billion, because only the most recent buildings in the city had been designed to withstand earthquakes.

The structures designed to modern Japanese codes all performed very well with minimal damage, but this only seemed to highlight the deficiencies in the older buildings. Much of the research in the EERC is aimed at improving current design practices and it was gratifying to see that the research we are doing is slowly improving our ability to design for earthquakes. However, this earthquake still caused many dramatic failures that show we have a long way to go before we can be really confident in our ability to overcome nature. For example the port of Kobe is built on man-made islands and cracks in the quays up to six feet deep have now rendered these facilities useless.

Inland, in the centre of town, the supports for a railway bridge have fractured in a very unusual way, and many buildings in the city have been so badly damaged that they will have to be demolished over the next few weeks.

But even with so much damage still around them the Japanese are starting to recover and are rebuilding their lives and city and I was constantly amazed at the resilience of the people and the speed at which order was being restored to the city.

For more information contact Adam Crewe.