Latest news with #KumamotoEarthquake
Yomiuri Shimbun
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Japan Seeks to Cut Nankai Trough Earthquake Deaths by 80 percent; Disaster Plan Revisions Also Aim to Halve Property Damage
Yomiuri Shimbun file photo The Prime Minister's Office in Tokyo The government aims to reduce by 80% the number of deaths caused by collapsed houses and other direct damage from a massive earthquake along the Nankai Trough, according to a draft for a basic disaster prevention promotion plan the government will revise based on the latest damage estimates for a magnitude-8 to -9 earthquake. It also seeks to halve the number of houses destroyed by such a quake. In the draft for the revised plan seen by The Yomiuri Shimbun, the government will set numerical targets for 134 priority measures, with the aim to achieve them within 10 years. This will be the first fundamental revision of the plan, which was established in 2014. In March, the government released a report that put the estimated death toll from direct damage at up to 298,000 in the event of a massive earthquake along the trough, which extends from off Shizuoka Prefecture to Miyazaki Prefecture. It also estimated that 52,000 people would die indirectly from the disaster and 2.35 million houses would be destroyed. Massive earthquakes in this region along the trough have been documented with an average recurrence period of about 100 to 150 years. The government has estimated that if a Nankai Trough quake occurs, 707 cities, towns and villages in 29 prefectures could be hit by a strong tremor or large tsunami. The government's Earthquake Research Committee has said the probability of a magnitude-8 or -9 megaquake occurring in the Nankai Trough within the next 30 years is 'around 80%.' The revised disaster prevention promotion plan is scheduled to be approved at a meeting of the Central Disaster Management Council as early as July. According to the draft, the government will emphasize the revision will focus on measures to 'protect and sustain the lives of people' based on the new damage estimates. These measures will concentrate on preventing direct deaths, and will include such steps as raising the completion rate for sea embankments with sufficient height to withstand tsunami to 50% in 2030, up from 42% in 2023. Many volunteer firefighters died while closing floodgates at the time of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and the revised plan will state that measures will be promoted to operate floodgates automatically and remotely. The percentage of social welfare facilities with brick walls resistant to earthquakes will also be increased to 53% in 2030 from 20% in 2022. Among measures to maintain lifelines, the proportion of important facilities with water and sewerage systems that have undergone quake-resistance work will be increased to 32% in 2030, up from 12% in 2023. Deaths from indirect causes were prominent in the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake and the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake. To help prevent this, the government aims to ensure that all municipalities satisfy the Sphere Standards — a set of internationally recognized principles and minimum humanitarian standards in four areas of response, including shelter and settlement — by 2030. The government's steps will include securing equipment such as portable beds.
Yomiuri Shimbun
18-05-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Pioneer Kumamoto Building Multilingual Disaster Support Network for Growing Foreign Population; System Provides Nationwide Model
KUMAMOTO — Local governments and communities of foreign residents in Kumamoto Prefecture are collaborating to build a network through which disaster support information can be disseminated in different languages, as part of an effort to prevent foreign nationals from becoming isolated during disasters. The prefecture intends to expand the network and has also initiated disaster preparedness training for foreigners. The initiative addresses the challenges in supporting foreigners that were faced during the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake and aims to bolster the growing foreign population's resilience against disasters. Experts, meanwhile, have commended the effort as an initiative that should be expanded nationwide. Communicating key information The Yomiuri Shimbun Pann Ei Nyein, third from left, and others listen to an explanation about emergency food and other supplies by a disaster preparedness official in Amakusa, Kumamoto Prefecture, in February. 'Our group has more than 800 Myanmar nationals who reside in Kumamoto Prefecture,' said Pann Ei Nyein, 29, at a disaster preparedness training session for foreigners held by the prefecture in late February in the Ushibuka district of Amakusa. She encouraged the Myanmar attendees to join the Kumamoto Myanmar Group, which she founded. Pann works as an engineer at a machinery manufacturer. The group typically uses social media to share their favorite restaurants and discuss the things that are troubling them. When a disaster occurs, the plan is for Pann, leveraging her strong Japanese skills, to receive information from the prefectural government and the Kumamoto International Foundation and communicate details about the distribution of supplies, the restoration of essential utilities and other information in Burmese to the others in the group. It was the Japanese language school she attends that asked her to collaborate on the initiative. Due to a labor shortage, the Ushibuka district has seen a rise in technical intern trainees from Southeast Asia, with about 250 foreigners residing there. On the day of the February training session, representatives of communities consisting of people from three countries visited the district and interacted with 13 foreign residents, including Indonesians and Filipinos. 'Japan experiences many earthquakes and a lot of heavy rain, so I'm relieved that there's an Indonesian association in Kumamoto,' said a 23-year-old Indonesian resident of the district. Learning from past disasters The foreign resident population in Kumamoto Prefecture stands at about 29,400, having almost tripled in the past 10 years. The surge is attributed to the arrival of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in the prefecture and other developments. Notably, the prefecture's growth rate of the number of foreign residents far exceeds that of the national average, which increased about 1.8 times over the same period. The prefecture has produced a leaflet introducing nine foreign resident community groups, including a Taiwan association. Since fiscal 2023, it has also initiated disaster preparedness training for foreigners in order to enhance cooperation during emergencies. This initiative addresses lessons learned from the Kumamoto Earthquake, when adequate support did not reach foreign residents. The Yomiuri Shimbun Andrew Mitchell holds a booklet introducing foreign resident groups and discusses the challenges of supporting foreigners, in Kumamoto on April 9. Among those affected by the earthquake was Andrew Mitchell, now 40, a specially appointed assistant professor at Kumamoto University and representative of a volunteer group called Keep, which he established. He still remembers the main tremor on April 16, 2016, during which the violent shaking made him think he was going to die. He fled to the university grounds empty-handed. At that time, he had no idea about evacuation centers or the provision of water and food supplies. As an international student from the United Kingdom with limited proficiency in Japanese, he was susceptible to misinformation on social media. A false report of a nearby bridge collapse, in particular, caused him considerable anxiety. He drew on his own experiences of the quake and decided to improve the support available to foreigners. He established Keep with four other international students and, in collaboration with the prefectural government, shares at disaster preparedness events the challenges he encountered during the earthquake, including the insufficient understanding of disaster-related vocabulary among foreigners and the necessity of inclusive disaster drills. 'There were foreigners in the corners of various evacuation centers looking anxious,' Le Thi Tram, 47, chairperson of the Vietnamese association in Kumamoto, recalled about her visits to evacuation centers after the main tremor. She pointed out the importance of a multilingual disaster response: 'Some people misunderstood and thought they could not receive water or supplies.' The association's Facebook page, established three years ago, has about 2,300 followers as of April. 'We want to leverage the community and cooperate with local governments to convey various support-related information during disasters,' Tram said. Collaboration an effective approach In the wake of the Kumamoto Earthquake and other successive disasters, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry since fiscal 2018 has been training foreign disaster information coordinators to assist at evacuation centers. About 190 individuals across the nation have registered for the training, which includes lessons on how to use multilingual translation apps. However, the vast majority of them are Japanese, underscoring a notable disparity. Commenting on Kumamoto Prefecture's efforts, an official of the ministry's international affairs office said: 'Providing multilingual translations during disasters presents a significant challenge. Collaborating with foreign resident communities is an effective approach.' University of Tokyo Prof. Naoya Sekiya, who specializes in the study of dissemination of disaster-related information, praised the initiative, saying, 'Providing information in people's native languages will undoubtedly reassure those who were affected by disasters. Other regions would be wise to consider this as a model.' He further emphasized the importance of building resilient communication networks, adding, 'Anticipating scenarios where the community's primary contact person is also impacted necessitates establishing multiple communication channels.'
Yomiuri Shimbun
01-05-2025
- Science
- Yomiuri Shimbun
JAXA Developing Program to Estimate Earthquake Damage to Buildings from Satellite Images; Aims to Improve Disaster Response Capabilities
The Yomiuri Shimbun Taishi Wada, a Kumamoto prefectural government official, talks about data from the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake in Kumamoto on April 3. KUMAMOTO — The Japan Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) is cooperating with the Kumamoto prefectural government to develop a program that quickly estimates damage to residential buildings by using satellite images in case of an earthquake. The prefectural government has provided JAXA with data on 200,000 residential buildings affected by the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake to help improve the program's accuracy. This is the first case in which JAXA is collaborating with a local government to develop a program. They aim to finish by the end of fiscal 2026. The program is expected to implement municipalities to take initial disaster responses in a swift manner. JAXA uses satellites to ascertain the shape of ground surfaces, such as elevations and sinkholes, on a regular basis. A radar using radio waves obtains images of ground surfaces during the day and night regardless of the weather conditions, while the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 'DAICHI-2' (ALOS-2) is capable of imaging an area extending 50 kilometers east-to-west and 'DAICHI-4,' a successor to Daichi-2 whose operation fully started this spring, increased the observation range to 200 kilometers. In case of a natural disaster, JAXA plans to use these satellite images to estimate damage to buildings by comparing and analyzing the shapes of buildings and ground surfaces before and after the disaster. Then, the agency would inform municipalities concerned of the damage estimates to help them choose areas to be prioritized in rescue efforts from a wide range of areas. However, compared to damage estimates in flooded areas, creating accurate damage estimates in an earthquake has been difficult because many different patterns exist in the ways that homes collapse in an earthquake. 'Bitter experience' in Noto JAXA has been developing the program to estimate earthquake damage to buildings since around 2020. However, it failed to provide accurate damage information after the Noto Peninsula Earthquake that occurred on Jan. 1, 2024, causing some municipalities to estimate only 10% of all buildings that were affected by the earthquake. 'The data on the damage to several hundreds residential buildings in certain areas were inputted into the program. However, the data was incomplete as we failed to cover all areas,' said Shiro Kawakita, a senior engineer at JAXA. 'We had a bitter experience in the Noto Peninsula Earthquake.' Learning from the experience, JAXA decided to use damage data on about 200,000 residential buildings in the Kumamoto Earthquake to improve the analytical precision of the program and proposed the idea to the prefectural government in May 2024. In January, the agency and the Kumamoto Prefecture signed an agreement. According to JAXA, many different areas were affected by the Kumamoto Earthquake, including urban locations as well as areas surrounded by mountains that did not suffer damage caused by tsunami or fire. Data from the earthquake would show damage only from the earthquake itself, allowing JAXA to develop a highly versatile program that can be applied to disaster-affected areas across the country. The prefectural government asked 16 municipalities where more than 1,000 residential buildings were damaged, such as Kumamoto and Mashiki, for cooperation and obtained approval from them to provide data for the JAXA program. To issue disaster-victim certificates, municipal officials visited each individual building that was damaged in the earthquake and classified the structures into four levels: 'completely destroyed,' 'partially destroyed on a large scale,' 'half destroyed' and 'partially destroyed.' JAXA will input satellite images from before and after an earthquake along with the location information of buildings and their damage levels into the program so that estimating the extent of damage can be done more accurately and quickly than before. 'We're glad that the data collected one by one by municipal officials will be used nationwide,' said Taishi Wada, a Kumamoto prefectural government official in charge of the project. Lessons applied nationwide The prefectural government is currently making adjustments with respective municipalities to provide data to JAXA. When the program is completed, estimating the damage to buildings will reportedly be able to be done in two or three hours after an earthquake occurs. 'We want to make it possible to understand the extent of damage as quickly as possible so that we can support [municipalities] in ensuring the safety of rescue workers and people affected by a disaster,' Kawakita said. Kumamoto Gov. Takashi Kimura said: 'It is our sincere hope that the lessons from the Kumamoto Earthquake are used for disaster responses across the nation. We would like to work together with [JAXA] to improve disaster response capabilities.'
