Kobe Earthquake

The January 17, 1995 Kobe Earthquake


On the first anniversary of the moment magnitude (MW) 6.7 1994 Northridge Earthquake, Kobe, Japan was struck by an MW6.9 earthquake. Both earthquakes struck in the pre-dawn hours, both ruptured beneath densely populated areas, and both caused horrible damage. Yet in Kobe there were many more deaths, financial losses dwarfed those in Northridge, and the amount of destroyed building stock and infrastructure was far worse in Kobe than in Northridge.
Despite differences in design and construction practices, the same general principles frequently came into play: highway collapses were often primarily due to insufficient lateral ties in the concrete columns, non-ductile concrete frame buildings did much worse than ductile design, shear walls typically helped to lessen catastrophic damage, and soft soils resulted in greater damage to the structures constructed on them.
The most important lesson in both earthquakes is that the knowledge to signific...