Kobe Earthquake
...ials had estimated that more than 300,000 people were homeless on the night of the earthquake. The devastation had also hurt Kobe and Osaka economically. The damage came to a total cost of about 147 billion dollars. The reason that this earthquake was so devastating was because Japan lies in one of the most seismically active areas of the world, with all of the major population concentrations affected by powerful earthquakes. Japan is set on one of the most extreme active tectonic setting. The Southwestern area of Japan is located on the southeastern margin of the Eurasian Plate, where the Philippine Sea Plate is being sub-ducted beneath the Eurasian Plate along the Nankai Trough. A portion of this relative plate motion is taken up by right-lateral strike-slip faulting along a major east-northeast-trending fault known as the Median Tectonic Line (MTL). The underground eruption caused ground failures, which affected buildings, subversive transportation, the port, highways, all types of other services on soft or filled ground. Ground failures occurred mainly because of liquefaction, the effect of loose, water-saturated sand being shaken during an earthquake and assuming a semi liquid state. Liquefaction is a phenomenon in which the strength and stiffness of a soil is reduced by earthquake shaking or other rapid loading. Liquefaction and related phenomena have been responsible for tremendous amounts of damage in historical earthquakes around the world. The places affected by liquefaction were more closely urbanized than any other earthquake-stricken section. These liquefied regions were mainly located on the coast of the Osaka bay. The earthquake put about 1,000,000 people without electricity from January 17th to January 23rd. There was more than 150 fires that occurred in Kobe and surrounding ...