Japan’s Early Warning System One of the Best in the World

18 March 2011

A man searches for a family member in the ruins of a tsunami-hit area in Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

A powerful earthquake struck the northeastern coast of Japan at two forty-six p.m. local time on March eleventh. Japan’s Meteorological Agency released its first tsunami warnings just three minutes later. The country has one of the best earthquake early warning systems in the world.

There are more than four thousand Seismic Intensity Meters in place throughout Japan to measure earthquake activity. These meters provide information within two minutes of an earthquake happening. Information about the strength and the center of the earthquake can be learned within three minutes.

There are also concrete sea walls around much of the Japanese coastline. But these measures proved no match for the powerful earthquake and tsunami.

Costas Synolakis is a tsunami expert with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

COSTAS SYNOLAKIS: "Japan is one of those most well-prepared countries on earth in terms of tsunami warning. They had a warning. I think what went wrong is that they had not anticipated the size of this event.”

He says there are two reasons for this. Japan has not had any event anywhere near as big as this one in the last one hundred fifty years. And scientists had not expected such a large earthquake happening off the coast of Japan.