How to Rebuild Japan

As anyone who has seen the astonishing video footage of Tokyo skyscrapers swaying from side to side can attest, Japan is at the very forefront of the science of earthquake-proofing buildings. But given that most of the damage and destruction was done by the subsequent tsunami, not the earthquake, Japan is now faced with some important decisions.

Unlike Haiti, where thousands of people lost their lives in an earthquake early last year, Japan is a wealthy, sophisticated, and, perhaps most importantly, supremely well-organized modern nation. Rebuilding the towns and villages that have been damaged will be a tremendous exercise, the cost of which may well run into trillions of yen, but it is exactly the sort of civil engineering challenge that the Japanese will rise to. They will honor their dead and dust themselves off, and then the engineers will be sent in. Order will be brought to chaos, and I suspect it will be done quickly.

In the short term, damage assessment is likely to focus on two very different areas. First, structural engineers will be sent into modern earthquake-proofed buildings to examine the impact of the quake on the quake-proofing technology.

Just because a building is still standing doesn't mean it hasn't been damaged. While certain elements of quake-proofing (such as diagonal bracing) are designed to help the building move with the shifting ground, others (such as viscous dampers and shock absorbers) are designed to dissipate the earthquake's energy. Damaged components will have to be replaced or, where the associated cost is too high, the building will need to be demolished. But that's not a failure for quake-proofing. It's a success: the building withstood the quake. For decades, that's been the primary aim of quake-proofing—preserving human life and avoiding extensive damage during moderate but oft-recurring earthquakes, not constructing buildings that can survive unscathed even after a monster earthquake like this one.

The second area of damage assessment will be on the devastation wrought by the tsunami. Traditional, low-lying Japanese houses and buildings are mostly of low cost and quick to build, as befits a country that has lived with the threat of earthquakes for centuries. So theoretically it's quite possible that many of the worst-hit areas could be rebuilt quickly. But before they are, the huge loss of life has to be taken into consideration.