Kobe Earthquake

At 05:40 am, on Tuesday, 17 January 1995 the Kobe earthquake struck with devastating consequences which included a high death rate, killing 5,000 people and making another 350,000 homeless. There are many reasons as to why there was such a high death toll and so many people made homeless, the main ones being the density of people living in buildings, 310 people per square kilometer, that had been built before 1960 and so weren’t built to withstand earthquakes and then the lack of equipment to rescue survivors in the smoky conditions and debris from fallen building cutting off emergency vehicle access.

The main reasons for the high death rate can be split into human and physical factors. The main physical factors are the location of the earthquakes epicenter that was only a few kilometers from Kobe, the aftershocks that damaged many of the buildings causing them to collapse, the tremors that followed broke underground pipes that caused gas leaks, electrical black outs and a lack of water. Another reason is that stress had built up in the rocks of the Pacific and Philippines plates causing a large and powerful earthquake that was centered only 14 km below the surface meaning that it produced a more violent earthquake.

The human reasons ranged from a lack of equipment to complacency. Most of the people that lived in Kobe saw it as a safe place as there hadn’t been an earthquake in the southern Japan region since 1956; this in turn made the experts less likely to look so closely to see a build up in pressure that showed an earthquake was immanent. Another reason for complacency was that Japan had the most sophisticated technical earthquake warning and prevention schemes. However this was undermined by the fact that most buildings before 1960 hadn’t been built to resist earthquakes and had heavy concrete roofs and some were even made of wood. The final set of reasons relate to the lack of equipment to deal with the earthquake.

The emergency services could rarely reach the places they were need at because roads were blocked by fallen building. Then if they did actually arrive where they were needed then the lack of equipment meant survivors were being dug out by bare hands in a smoky environment meaning that visibility was low. An additional reason that it was hard to search for people was that of fires caused by gas leaks, which caused fires, lasting up to 7 days. When the fire service reached a fire it was rare for it to be put out because the engine would run out of water.

Many of the human and physical points like together such as after tremors causing damage to buildings that should have been earthquake-proof, it is also liked by the fact that experts knew an earthquake was probable but didn’t react. The final link is that of the earthquake breaking underground pipes, had they been produced to a high standard, possibly double cased then the leaks may not of happened and so electricity wouldn’t have been lost and fires wouldn’t have started making the rescue operation a lot easy.

In conclusion I believe that the major death toll and loss of housing was caused by ignorance because an earthquake hadn’t happened for a long period in a large region. Secondly the lack of equipment and co-ordination of the rescue effort and finally the fact that buildings and pipelines hadn’t been updated to be earthquake proof, which would have prevented a lot of the damage and deaths.