All the training fails after the fear sets in

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This article was published 12/03/2011 (5516 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO — Earthquakes dwell deep in the Japanese imagination.

No country may be better prepared for a major earthquake than Japan. Seismic standards for construction are among the strictest in the world. From a young age, Japanese learn to dive under desks to protect themselves in a quake. The nation has a state-of-the-art tsunami warning system.

That preparation undoubtedly saved many lives on Friday, when a magnitude 8.9 earthquake struck offshore of Japan’s main island, shaking buildings in a large swath of the country and sending a nine-metre tsunami onto a populated stretch of coast.

But an uncomfortable truth may emerge from this quake, which killed hundreds of people and caused damage that could mount into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The lesson is there’s only so much disaster preparedness can do. At some point, humans — even humans in an affluent society, equipped with 21st-century technology and peerless infrastructure — respond to deeper emotions, to panic or flee.

The scenes from Japan captured the almost incomprehensible power of one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. The tsunami swept away houses, cars and ships like so much debris in a storm channel. Roads split apart; buildings buckled. And faces registered the shock and bewilderment of people whose disaster training vaporized in the violence of the moment.

“The people in my office were frozen,” said Shinji Tanaka, who works at an information technology company in Tokyo. “Nobody had any idea what to do.”

Every year, Japan marks “Disaster Prevention Day,” to commemorate the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed more than 100,000 people in and around Tokyo. That disaster, along with the 1995 quake in Kobe, which killed more than 6,000 people, are as drilled into Japanese memory as the Second World War. Last August, the annual drill was built around a scenario in which there was a triple earthquake that killed an estimated 25,000 people and destroyed 550,000 buildings, an assessment based on a 2003 projection by the government’s Central Disaster Prevention Council.

“For every Japanese, there’s the fear of the big one,” said Ando Yasunori, 27, a magazine editor who was visiting India when the latest quake struck Japan. “Nobody knows if it will come tomorrow, in a year, 10 years or 100 years, but many Japanese know it will come.”

The preparations have become part of the culture. Most schools and offices keep helmets handy, as well as first aid kits. Disaster training begins early and can include sessions in earthquake simulators that mimic the impact of a major quake on a building.

Not all of that preparation came into play on Friday. It appears the tsunami hit too quickly for any warning system to help. Although some people could be seen wearing helmets after the quake, most lacked the time or presence of mind to put one on.

— The Los Angeles Times