Word: kobe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last month's earthquake in Kobe, at 7.2 in magnitude, was roughly 10 times as powerful as today's quake...
...magnitude of Kobe's damage will surely divert large amounts of money from other Japanese projects. Said Mark Brown, a construction-industry analyst for BZW Securities in Tokyo: ``Big damage doesn't necessarily mean good news for construction companies. It's certainly no cause for dancing in the streets.'' In the U.S., a letter writer to the New York Times expressed the same skepticism. Economics professor Thomas Martin wrote, ``If we accept this fallacy, we should also expect to see bombing campaigns included in the next fiscal-stimulus package.'' A rebuilding project that will not want for money is Kobe...
...quake had clearly wrought damage on a grand scale to a port that handled 2.7 million containers last year, including 31% of all exports to the U.S. While shipping lines rerouted their cargo via other ports, Kobe-area manufacturers of products from steel to flat-panel computer displays studied ways to get their goods on the road. Commented Yasuo Iwamoto, marketing chief for the Kobe Port Authority: ``The fact is that Kobe was the container center for Japan. In the long term, I doubt that other ports can take the load we divert to them...
Scawthorn happened to be in Osaka when the quake hit and spent the next several days surveying the damage in Kobe. What he saw convinced him that relatively simple precautions could have prevented the most common form of damage: the roofs and upper stories of buildings crashing down onto lower floors. Such ``pancake'' collapses accounted for 90% of the 5,090 deaths in Kobe...
Many older commercial buildings in central Kobe, mostly constructed with reinforced concrete, suffered pancake collapses. In such cases the prescription is also to add stronger interior reinforcing, often by replacing a few existing room dividers with permanent, weight-bearing walls. Retrofitting buildings to survive another Big One is still rare in Japan, but in the wake of the Kobe tragedy it may catch on. By Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo