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Seconds From Disaster
Japan installs the world's first nationwide earthquake-detector system.
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| A building falls from the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. With losses of more than $100 billion, it was the costliest natural disaster ever to befall a single country. |
The detector also has a possible dark side. Authorities now worry that false alarms or news of an impending disaster could cause panic. On the crowded streets of Tokyo, that could be a public-health hazard in its own right. "We have to be careful how we use it," says Shinya Tsukada, a senior scientific officer at the Japan Meteorological Agency. "The information is very powerful, but there is a scientific limit to its accuracy."
Still, something must be done. Despite its tiny size, Japan is the target of 20 percent of all quakes that rate a 6 or higher on the Richter scale. A recent government study estimated that $955 billion worth of damage and 11,000 deaths could result from a magnitude 7.3 earthquake directly under the northern part of Tokyo Bay—a monster quake many seismologists believe is long overdue.
