Right, the building housing Sony’s office in Tokyo uses base isolation, as well as another seismic technology known as shock absorbing dampers. Left, Los Angeles City Hall was retrofitted with base isolators. “A lot of people would say ‘no’ and maybe some people would say ‘yes.’” “Do we want to be more like Japan and are we willing to pay the price?” said Joyce Fuss, president of the Structural Engineers Association of California. Analogous to America’s debate over health insurance, the American philosophy has been to make more resilient buildings an individual choice, not a government mandate. The two approaches reflect different attitudes toward risk, the role of government and collective social responsibility. The United States sets a minimum and less protective standard with the understanding that many buildings will be badly damaged. Japan, through both government mandates and its engineering culture, builds stronger structures capable of withstanding earthquakes and being used immediately afterward.
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Japan and the United States, two of the world’s most technologically advanced countries, have the same problem - how to protect people and society from earthquakes - and yet they have responded in very different ways. But the amount of damage they cause is a function of decisions made by politicians, engineers and business executives. Seismic safety advocates describe this as a missed opportunity to save billions of dollars in reconstruction costs after the inevitable Big One strikes.Įarthquakes are of course natural phenomena. Thousands of other buildings in the country have been fitted with shock-absorbing devices that can greatly reduce damage and prevent collapse.Ĭhile, China, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Turkey and other countries vulnerable to earthquakes have adopted the technologies to varying degrees.īut with notable exceptions, including Apple’s new headquarters in Silicon Valley, the innovations have been used only sparingly in the United States. Itakura’s building is used in roughly 9,000 structures in Japan today, up from just two dozen at the time of the Kobe earthquake. Itakura had been cushioned from the violence of the earthquake because his three-story office building was sitting on an experimental foundation made from rubber - an early version of an engineering technique called base isolation. The Great Hanshin earthquake of January 17, 1995, killed more than 6,000 people in and around the industrial port city. “I thought to myself, this earthquake is not that big,” Mr. His office swayed, but the books stayed on their shelves and nothing fell off his desk. When the shaking started at 5:46 a.m., Yasuhisa Itakura, an architect at a big Japanese construction company in Kobe, was sitting at his desk finishing a report he had toiled over all night.
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