Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [123]
The report said the government should admit that seismic forecasting was not currently possible and shift the program’s focus. It was the sharpest criticism ever, and it did eventually lead to a change in direction. With so much invested and so much more at stake, though, there was no way the whole campaign would be ditched. People in Japan are intimately aware of earthquakes and the public desire for some kind of warning—whether unreasonable or not—is a political reality that cannot be ignored.
Faults in the Tokai region off the coast of Japan—where three tectonic plates come together—have rattled the earth repeatedly and people worry about the next one. The subduction zone there tore apart in 1854, the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923 killed more than 140,000 people, two more big fault breaks occurred in the 1940s, and another magnitude 8 is expected any day now.
Japan’s first five-year prediction research plan was launched in 1965. In 1978, with still no sign of an impending quake, the program was ramped up with passage of the Large-Scale Earthquake Countermeasures Act, which concentrated most of the nation’s seismic brain power and technical resources on the so-called Tokai Gap. Whenever some anomaly is observed by the monitoring network, a special evaluation committee of technical experts—known locally as “the six wise men”—must be paged and rushed by police cars to a command center in Tokyo, where they will gather around a conference table and focus on the data stream. Then very quickly they must decide whether or not to call the prime minister.
If the anomaly is identified as a reliable precursor, only the prime minister has the authority to issue a warning to Tokyo’s thirteen million residents. If and when that day comes, a large-scale emergency operation will be initiated almost immediately. Bullet trains and factory production lines will be stopped, gas pipelines will shut down, highway traffic will be diverted, schools will be evacuated, and businesses will close. According to one study a shutdown like that would cost the Japanese economy as much as $7 billion per day, so the six wise men can’t afford to get it wrong. False alarms would be exceedingly unwelcome.
Even though the people of Japan still tell their leaders they want some kind of warning system, they were not at all impressed with what happened in Kobe in 1995. With all those smart people and so much equipment focused on the Tokai Gap, apparently nobody saw the Kobe quake coming. It was an ugly surprise from a fault that was not considered a threat. It killed more than six thousand people.
In spite of the embarrassing setback, Kiyoo Mogi, a professor at Nihon University and then chair of the wise men’s committee, defended the prediction program, calling it Japan’s moral obligation not only to its own citizens but to people in poorer, quake-prone countries around the world as well. “Can we give up efforts at prediction and just passively wait for a big one?” he asked. “I don’t think so.” What Mogi did was try to change the rules.
He argued that a definite “yes or no” prediction—as the six wise men are required by law to make—was beyond Japan’s technical capability with the knowledge and equipment available. Instead, he suggested the warnings be graded with some level of probability, expressed like weather forecasts. The government could say, for example, that there’s a 40 percent chance of an earthquake this week. People would be made aware that it might happen and that they ought to prepare themselves.
Mogi’s idea was rejected, so he resigned from the committee in 1996. The program carried on but it gradually changed direction. In the aftermath of Kobe prediction research spending