Unbelievable Japan Building Codes - Saves Life and Limit Destruction in 8.9 Richter earthquake 2011

April 2, 2011 - PRLog -- Once again after got hit by the latest twin disaster of powerful earthquake and tsunami, Japan proves to be the best-prepared country for its stringent building codes and warning systems. It is interesting to see that most buildings have only minimal damages after the powerful 8.9 magnitude hit and consistent after shocks.

Trace back to Japanese earthquake historical tragedies e.g. Tsunami in Shikoku, the great Kanto earthquake in Tokyo or the Kobe earthquake in 1995, they have been learn from those painful disasters and this brings to the reason why their building codes are very tough. Kobe earthquake is a great wake-up call because of its uncountable devastation; more than 200,000 buildings were ruined, massive numbers of injuries and dead. These strikes Japanese authorities to increase more security and renovate their construction systems especially in tighten their codes. Even though the damaged buildings from Kobe earthquake were code-constructed buildings, they had found out to be not sufficient and since Japan is located on Pacific Ring of Fire, earthquakes and volcano eruptions are likely to happened fairy often. Eventually the government invested billions yens in an attempt to fostering new construction system to prevent future damage from a quake. They retrofitted exist buildings and outfit modern buildings with advanced devices called base-isolation pads and energy dissipation unit to absorb the shock and depress the ground’s shaking during an earthquake. Base-isolation is the use of huge rubber and steel pads that will be installed at the bottom of the buildings. This will promote more stiffness and strength to reduce seismic damage.    

According to Japanese building code regulations, tall buildings are supposed to sway roughly back and forth during a quake which means the buildings must be flexible enough to sway but still have strong connected movement to the ground. Many videos people captured during the earthquake shows that tall buildings were obviously swayed back and forth but none of them was ruined. “Technically they were constructed to function as a tree in the wind- swayed but stand”, mentioned a renowned structural engineer Bill Faschan. However, we can see that most of the loss and damages caused by this twin disaster are mainly from the wave rather than the earthquake, yet, both still connected.

An interesting point is that without Japanese stringent building codes and effective seismic warning systems, the loss and damages can possibly far beyond we can imagine.

# # #

Lifesbox, manufactured housing builder (www.lifesbox.com ) is an engineering group has been in business since 1988 in consulting, designing, and manufacturing quality Custom Built Modular Buildings with prefabricated technologies in Thailand.