Friday, June 19, 2009

7,300 Schools in Japan Face Quake Threat

Yumei Wang, who leads Oregon’s effort to cut risks from inevitable earthquakes, pointed me to news from Japan that more than 7,300 school buildings in that country face “a high risk of collapse” in a strong earthquake. That might seem a small number as a proportion of the country’s nearly 125,000 school buildings, but that’s just the schools that are in the worst shape. Japan’s education ministry found, all told, that 41,206 school buildings are insufficiently reinforced.
Over all, government officials point to substantial progress in the country’s effort to reduce vulnerability before the next big quake. According to The Japan Times, the number of school buildings at risk of collapse declined by 3,347 from the previous year. The article said the ministry had pledged to make 16,000 school buildings quake-resistant in the current fiscal year and planned to eliminate school structures at risk of collapse by March 2011.
On an issue like earthquake-risk reduction there is constant tension, given competing priorities, over how much to spend to limit deaths in a seismic shock that might come tomorrow, or not for decades. But the stakes are rising fast globally. Population growth and urbanization have put unprecedented numbers of people at risk. Seismologists are warning that a million-casualty disaster is all but inevitable given the threat and exposure in cities like Istanbul and Tehran.
How’s Oregon doing? The state faces an almost inevitable mega-quake and tsunami threat, geologists say. As I wrote shortly after the deaths of thousands of students in collapsed schools during China’s Sichuan Province earthquake, more than 1,000 schools in Oregon are essentially rubble in waiting.
Ms. Wang told me that a bill moving toward a vote in the Oregon State Senate includes the first $30 million to begin what will be a decades-long retrofitting project for schools. But as the seismic clock ticks, and hundreds of millions of dollars are needed.
She said she remained worried that even that $30 million could be whittled away in the next few weeks. Is this another variant on the “blah, blah, blah, bang” dynamic that some also see in the climate debate

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