November 7, 1999 - Tokyo expects big quake soon - Government says half-million buildings will fall in temblor.
This is a city that expects, any day now, to see 7,000 people die, nearly 4 million made homeless and a half-million buildings collapse or burn.
Tokyo's residents expect the Big Quake -- a magnitude 7 temblor that will devastate the city, much like the one in 1923. And they don't just expect it sometime; they expect it soon.
The rumble of large earthquakes through Turkey and Taiwan, and less-deadly temblors in Greece and California in the past three months, have pricked the nerves of this city's residents. With so much movement in the geological plates, the Japanese figure it won't be long before their world starts shaking. A recent government study came up with the somber casualty estimates.
City planners say most victims of a major Tokyo earthquake would not be crushed, they would burn to death. The thousands of frame houses built in the first few decades after the war are firetraps. The metropolitan government last year identified areas with large concentrations of wooden structures and is making plans to move people into new high-rise apartments and configure neighborhoods to provide broad avenues and open spaces as fire lines.
Experts studying the history of quakes in these unstable islands have tried to detect patterns long before the Great Kanto Quake off Tokyo's shoreline in 1923. That awesome, 7.9-magnitude quake, and the tsunamis and fires that followed, killed 99,300 people. "Every 10 years somewhere in Japan there is an earthquake of sizable magnitude," said Koide. "Kobe was five years ago." Another pattern indicates that a major earthquake has occurred in the Tokyo area an average of every 69 years, and is seven years overdue. In 1992, a disaster planning agency of the national government predicted that another quake in south Kanto, which includes Tokyo, is "imminent."
(Doug Struck - Washington Post)
November 6, 1999 -
TOKYO--Japan's recent accident at a uranium processing plant, which exposed safety flaws in the country's aggressive nuclear energy program, has renewed concerns that an earthquake could trigger another crisis if it were to strike close to reactors or nuclear-related facilities.
Japanese activists and some seismologists point out that some of this earthquake-prone archipelago's 51 nuclear reactors are built in areas where quakes are likely. They also contend that four dozen nuclear-related treatment and processing facilities could also be prone to radiation leaks in the event the "big one" strikes.
"I think the situation right now is very scary," says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist at Kobe University. "It's like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode."
Ishibashi argues that the government's prime criteria for judging whether nuclear power plants are safe are "absolutely wrong" from a seismological standpoint. Among the factors used to decide where to locate plants are past earthquake data and proximity to known fault lines and to the ocean, which is used to cool reactors.
Ishibashi predicts that the area of a nuclear plant in Shizuoka prefecture in central Japan--while not considered part of an active seismic region--will be the site of the next big quake. A fifth reactor is under construction at the plant.
Earthquakes often occur in areas where faults have not been found, which was the case in the 1995 temblor in Kobe.
"It is wrong to give too much weight to active fault research for measuring earthquake possibilities at nuclear power plant sites," Ishibashi says. "Active faults reflect only a part of the whole earthquake state, just like a tail of an animal."
Japanese and international regulators, as well as the Japanese companies building the reactors, note that earthquake data are taken into consideration in the placement of reactors, which they say can withstand earthquakes as great as magnitude 8.5.
If an earthquake hits a plant, safety devices will function even if other facilities are damaged, and the reactor will automatically stop, cool down and then prevent leakage, says Yuji Kurotani, senior examiner in Japan's Nuclear Power Safety Examination Division.
An earthquake larger than 8.5 could spell trouble, however.
"Then it will be the same as Chernobyl," says Kurotani, referring to the world's worst nuclear accident, the reactor meltdown in Ukraine in 1986. "But that kind of case will never happen."
Unlike in Japan, a country lacking in natural resources that is aggressively beefing up its nuclear power program to supplant reliance on imported fuels, the issue of vulnerability to earthquakes hasn't come up much in the U.S. in recent years. No nuclear reactors have been built since the late 1970s, after cost overruns and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident all but ended nuclear-energy expansion.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says none of the world's 434 nuclear power plants have experienced major problems that were due to earthquakes, a statistic that illustrates the "strength of construction which is rightly part of their basic design," says spokesman David Kyd.
He says nuclear power plants are built with "tremendously strengthened foundations and structural features to ensure that they can withstand the biggest conceivable earthquake."
"This is why nuclear power plants in both Japan and California, for example, and more recently in Taiwan, have ridden out fairly major earthquakes without damage," Kyd says.
But Ishibashi contends that, even if new faults are found--as in the case of Shimane nuclear plant in western Japan--the government doesn't disclose details or revise plans.
A group of about 300 local activists has been suing to block the construction of a planned third reactor at the plant.
"There were supposed to be no faults, which is why the plant was approved in the first place under the government's safety guidelines," says Yasue Ashihara, who is spearheading the opposition group.
"Since now we know that the active fault exists around the reactors, the facts indicate that they no longer meet the safety guidelines," Ashihara says.
(Los Angeles Times)
TOKYO - April 1999 - Forecasts based on historical earthquake cycles indicate Tokyo could be due.
``A chokkagata (a major earthquake that strikes directly below the city) is said to be imminent,'' said Toshio Nara of the Tokyo city government's disaster planning division. The city sits on one of the most earthquake-prone spots in the world. Nearly 20 miles beneath its streets, three gigantic slabs of the Earth's crust creep in different directions at rates of barely an inch a year. Sometimes these tectonic plates snag on each other, causing tension to build until they snap forward again.
Following the catastrophic earthquake that flattened much of Kobe four years ago, Japanese officials have scrambled to prepare for what scientists say is the inevitable: a similar or even stronger quake hitting Tokyo.
With a population of 12 million, nine times that of Kobe, Tokyo is a disaster waiting to happen. But while they have tried to apply the lessons learned from Kobe, where bureaucratic paralysis was blamed for needlessly inflating the death toll of 6,425, experts stress a large quake in Tokyo could pose a host of new problems. ``There are a lot of things Kobe didn't prepare us for,'' said Hiroatsu Fukuda, a researcher at Tokyo's Waseda University. ``Tokyo really isn't ready.''
An estimated 10,000 Tokyo residents died in 1855, the last time a major earthquake struck directly below the city. And that quake was not even the magnitude of the feared ``Big One.'' Seismologists expect a magnitude-8 shock to hit somewhere along the coast west of Tokyo with the force of a 50-megaton atomic bomb. The last time that happened was in 1923, and as many as 150,000 people died.
While a quake of that size remains a constant danger, experts say a smaller -- but still deadly -- jolt from directly below the city will probably hit first.
City officials predict a 7.2-magnitude earthquake of that type, similar to the one that struck Kobe, would kill more than 7,000 people, injure 160,000 and leave at least 2.3 million homeless. More than a half-million buildings would burn or collapse, inflicting damage worth several times Kobe's $120 billion. World financial markets could also panic as trading in Tokyo crashed to a halt.
November 7, 1999 - Tokyo expects big quake soon - Government says half-million buildings will fall in temblor.
