The 1923 Kantō earthquake in Tokyo led to fires responsible for 90% of the 105,000 casualties. This tragedy, detailed in a new paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, offers lessons for current earthquake scientists and urban planners.
The threat of earthquake conflagrations has not disappeared. The authors say places with strong seismic shaking and a large inventory of wood-framed buildings– the U.S. West Coast including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, Japan and parts of New Zealand—must emphasize fire prevention and response as part of their earthquake mitigation plans.
Imamura’s warnings, however, were ridiculed by Japan’s leading seismologist at the time, Ōmori Fusakichi, a senior colleague, who did not believe in the seismic gap theory. Ōmori also thought earthquakes rarely took place in stormy or windy weather, so there would not be enough wind to cause fires to spread.
The fires merged until some were so large that they generated their own high winds, turning into fire whirls or cyclones that consumed everything in their path.paper, Tomoaki Nishino of the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University helped to explore the big picture of the fires including wind-blown fire plumes and model the spread of the fires, especially their relationship to wind direction and velocity.