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Japanese pupils first in prevention
The recent tsunami that devastated the Indian Ocean coasts has made it obvious that high-risk areas need to mitigate the effects of natural disasters. Japan long ago put together the world’s best tsunami warning system. The key to its effectiveness: making even the youngest citizens aware.
Judging from the champion’s pose, arms outstretched with trophy in hand, you might have thought that 15-year-old Tomoya Hirata’s team had just won one of Japan’s prestigious national sporting events.
But triumph for Hirata and his 61 classmates at Shinjo Middle School, came for their tsunami preparedness project at the second annual “Disaster Prevention Education Challenge Plan” workshop, held last month [February 27, 2005]. The national program, sponsored by the cabinet and several ministries, selects the year’s top twenty local disaster prevention programs and then awards one top prize.
They take tsunami disaster mitigation seriously in Japan, especially in places like Tanabe, Wakayama prefecture, where Hirata’s school is. The town sits out on the Kii peninsula which, facing the Nankai and Tonankai seismogenic zones, has been struck several times by deadly tsunamis and is thought to be prime target for another major one in the near future.
With earthquake generating zones all around, the country has developed a national tsunami warning system that is generally taken to be the best in the world.
But the warnings alone mean little. “A warning alone doesn’t save lives,” says Haruo Hayashi, a professor at Kyoto University’s Research Center for Disaster Reduction Systems, who chaired the organizing committee for the workshop. “The warning is just a trigger,” he says. “People need priming.”
Beating the clock
Japan’s warning system is an impressive one, whose development accelerated in the 1980s. In 1983, a hundred people died when a magnitude 7.7 quake gave rise to a tsunami hit on the Japan sea coast. The warning came in 17 minutes. The tsunami came in seven.
The current system is based on a network of 180 seismometers cabled to onshore monitoring stations. It takes only two minutes for a preliminary measurement of an earthquake to reach one of six regional monitoring stations.
Then the computer magic begins. The Japan Meteorological Association has pre-calculated 100,000 scenarios based on location, depth, and magnitude of a given earthquake. Within one minute, the simulations predict whether and where the earthquake might produce a tsunami. The warnings ride along television screens and set in motion local disaster mitigation measures.
Estimates may be off, and small tsunami can be either missed or their impact overestimated. But with the looming threat of a large tsunami from the nearby Nankai trough, which runs only Japan’s pacific coast, there is no choice. “Speed is more important than accuracy,” says Hayashi.
Experts think that an earthquake is overdue there. The greatest fear is that it could wreak havoc on Tokyo. But tsunamis are a great fear all along the coast. A Nankai earthquake of magnitude 8.6 would, according to simulations, throw a 7.5 meter tsunami wave at Wakayama in eight minutes.
Japan’s system would get a warning in time. But would people have the wherewithal to react?
Child’s play
Preparedness exercises take place in most Japanese coastal towns. And the training starts young.
Efforts start with construction of tsunami hazard maps, based on the country’s tsunami disaster prevention manual distributed by the cabinet office. The maps outline potential dangers such as narrow roads likely to be washed out and bridges likely to be wiped out in a tsunami event. They also clearly mark where refuge points are.
Part of the Tanabe team’s winning entry is a 3-D map of the coastline showing where the water would likely inundate. Another group added an inductive approach to estimating tsunami arrival times, interviewing the town’s tsunami veterans about how long previous tsunami took to reach their homes.
Preparedness measures also take into consideration that, like the Sumatra tsunami in December, tsunamis often victimize people not familiar with the area. Across the Kii peninsula from Tanabe, students at three schools in Kushimoto, created easy to grasp pictograms that indicate the height of a given location above sea level and the direction of the ocean. The signs have been placed at easily noticeable spots around town making it easier for people, especially visitors, to know where to go for refuge. Takaharu Sugimoto, an official in the local government, says they are hoping that UNESCO will adopt the design, which won a runner-up prize at this year’s workshop, as an international standard.
Striving to impress upon the community tsunami’s potential danger, Shinjo middle-schoolers hit on a morbid historical lesson. They designed a traditional Japanese “kamishibai”—a play using drawings along to illustrate the speakers’ narrative— based on an 1944 episode, “unthinkable today”, in which the government stopped issuing weather reports and information on disasters lest they prove a disadvantage to the war effort. Unsure of what to do, the protagonist, the son of a fallen soldier, is swept away by a tsunami leaving his mother completely alone.
Materials produced by the students in Tanabe and elsewhere are incorporated into role-playing activities and drills. In Tanabe, some 80% of the citizens turn out for these yearly events. The sirens sound and the people dart off towards the refuge site. At the end, they meet to discuss how much Students have produced an illustrated story to raise awareness of tsunamis time expired—and what the implications would have been for their safety.
But some preparedness activities might not be suitable for children. Three years ago, citizens living on a landfill coast in Kushimoto came to grips with news that a tsunami would come in less than 10 minutes after an earthquake. In their drills they knew it took 15 minutes to make the roundabout trip to the appointed refuge site.
A direct path would force them to go over one of the national railway tracks. Negotiations with Japan Railways went nowhere. In the end the citizens took matters into their own hands and built the bridge anyway. Now they can get to their refuge in six minutes.
Photo © David Cyranoski: Students have produced an illustrated story to raise awareness of tsunamis.
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Author(s) |
David Cyranoski, Asia-Pacific correspondent for Nature
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the new Courier
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