Japan quake reminds Tokyo of potential disaster

TOKYO, Mar 27 (Reuters) Despite efforts by Tokyo to prepare for a powerful earthquake like the one that hit central Japan on Sunday, thousands are likely to die in a tremor that experts say could hit one of the world's biggest cities at any time.

Forecasts of casualties in a major quake in Tokyo vary wildly.

A January estimate by the city government put the number of dead at a few thousand, while a 2004 study by insurer Munich Re said hundreds of thousands could die and damage would run into trillions of dollars.

''It would not be surprising for a major quake to happen anywhere in Japan at any time,'' the Nikkei business daily said in an editorial yesterday. ''This quake reminds us that it is not only local governments but individuals who must prepare.'' Large areas of tightly packed wooden houses vulnerable to fire remain on the outskirts of the city, although many such homes have been replaced with concrete buildings in recent years, meaning casualties would likely be far lower than in the capital's last major earthquake some 84 years ago.

The Great Kanto earthquake of September 1, 1923, killed more than 140,000 people, many being burned to death in fires set off as the tremor hit while they were cooking lunch.

The high-rise buildings that have sprung up across parts of the conurbation of 35 million since then pose their own risks.

''Our experiments have shown that the top floors of very tall buildings will sway from side to side by about 4 metres,'' said Norio Maki, an assistant professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University.

''That means furniture will fly around, and we don't know what the consequences of that will be.'' The sheer numbers of people in tower-block offices and apartment buildings could also make evacuation difficult.

''We don't think they will fall down,'' Toshio Watanabe of the disaster prevention section at the Tokyo city government. ''But the lifelines of water, electricity and gas may be cut off, making it impossible for people to live there.'' A Tokyo government proposal released in January calls for the ratio of quake-proof buildings to be raised from 76 per cent to 90 per cent, or 100 per cent along major roads, to try to halve the number of casualties.

But confidence in the earthquake-proofing of even the newest buildings has been undermined by a scandal over falsified engineering data for hotels and apartment buildings.

Architect Hidetsugu Aneha was jailed for five years in December for his role in the scam and two others received suspended sentences.

A major quake in the daytime would also leave more than 11 million people stranded, many as much as two hours' train ride away from their homes, according to city figures.

On Sunday, a fledgling early warning system enabled the Japan Meteorological Agency to send a warning to monitors about 50 km from the tremor's focus five seconds before a strong quake rattled the western coast of central Japan.

But the hardest-hit spot failed to receive the warning before the tremor struck because it was too close to the focus.

Sunday morning's 6.9 magnitude quake struck Noto peninsula in Ishikawa prefecture, 300 km west of Tokyo, killing one person and injuring nearly 200. It destroyed houses, buckled roads, triggered landslides and cut off water and electricity supplies to thousands of homes.

Japan's central government aims to have all large firms set up contingency plans by 2015, and is offering guidelines and cheap loans to help them do so.

But private surveys show only 10 to 20 per cent of large companies so far have contingency plans in place, a Cabinet Office official said.

Despite government publicity campaigns, one of the biggest problems officials say they face is individual apathy.

In a survey this year of survivors of the 1995 Kobe quake in which about 6,400 people died, Kyodo news agency said it found 70 per cent had not got around to securing items of furniture to the walls -- a precaution that experts say could save many lives.

''People often say they want us to focus on quake preparedness, but I have a feeling that there are a lot of residents who have not actually done anything to prepare in their own homes,'' city official Watanabe said.

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