An original approach to fill the gap in the earthquake disaster experience - a proposal for ‘the archive of the quake experience’ -

Abstract:

People without severe disaster experience infallibly forget even the extraordinary one like 3.11 as time advances. Therefore, to improve the resilient society, an ingenious attempt to keep people’s memory of disaster not to fade away is necessary.

Since 2011, we have been caring out earthquake disaster drills for residents of high-rise apartments, for schoolchildren, for citizens of the coastal area, etc. Using a portable earthquake simulator (1), the drill consists of three parts, the first: a short lecture explaining characteristic quakes expected for Japanese people to have in the future, the second: reliving experience of major earthquakes hit Japan since 1995, and the third: a short lecture for preparation that can be done at home and/or in an office.

For the quake experience, although it is two dimensional movement, the real earthquake observation record is used to control the simulator to provide people to relive an experience of different kinds of earthquake including the long period motion of skyscrapers. Feedback of the drill is always positive because participants understand that the reliving the quake experience with proper lectures is one of the best method to communicate the past disasters to their family and to inherit them to the next generation.

There are several kinds of archive for disaster as inheritance such as pictures, movies, documents, interviews, and so on. In addition to them, here we propose to construct ‘the archive of the quake experience’ which compiles observed data ready to relive with the simulator.

We would like to show some movies of our quake drill in the presentation.

Reference: (1) Kuroda, S. et al. (2012), “Development of portable earthquake simulator for enlightenment of disaster preparedness”, 15^th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering 2012, Vol. 12, 9412-9420.