This paper presents wireless systems for use in disaster recovery operations. The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 reinforced the importance of communications in, to, and between disaster areas as lifelines. It also revealed that conventional wireless systems used for disaster recovery need to be renovated to cope with technological changes and to provide their services with easier...

OBJECTIVE Fatalities and injuries during an earthquake can be reduced by taking preemptive measures before-hand, and furniture anchoring is an important safety measure for all residents. This study sought to clarify the factors associated with furniture anchoring within the home. METHODS A self-administered mail survey was completed from July to August 2010 by 3500 men and women between the a...

This paper reflects the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) data utilization for near-real time earthquake and/or tsunami damage assessment in urban areas. In order to show the potential of the fully polarimetric high resolution polarimetric SAR (POLSAR) image data sets, a fourcomponent scattering power decomposition scheme has been developed and applied to monitor near-real time ear...

BACKGROUND Research on long-term health effects of earthquakes is scarce, especially in low- and middle-income countries, which are disproportionately affected by disasters. To date, progress in this area has been hampered by the lack of tools to accurately measure these effects. Here, we explored whether long-term public health effects of earthquakes can be assessed using a combination of read...

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake occurred off the coast of Honshu, Japan. The quake was followed by a powerful tsunami that caused extensive damage to the east coast of the Tohoku and Kanto regions. This disaster destroyed the medical system in place and thus drastically reduced the ability of the healthcare system to handle the large number of casualties. During the initial response to this di...

The huge earthquake in 11 March 2012 which followed by a destructive tsunami in Japan was largest recorded earthquake in the history. Japan is pioneer in disaster management, especially earthquakes. How this developed country faced this disaster, which had significant worldwide effects? The humanitarian behavior of the Japanese people amazingly wondered the word's media, meanwhile the managemen...

This paper compares recovery in the wake of three recent earthquakes: the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011; the Van earthquake in Turkey in October 2011; and the Maule earthquake in Chile in February 2010. The authors visited all three locations approximately 12-18 months after the incidents and interviewed earthquake specialists, disaster managers, urban planners, and local authoritie...

Integrated earthquake simulation (IES) is a seamless simulation of analyzing all processes of earthquake hazard and disaster. There are two difficulties in carrying out IES, namely, the requirement of large-scale computation and the requirement of numerous analysis models for structures in an urban area, and they are solved by taking advantage of high performance computing (HPC) and by developi...

The concept of plate tectonics is generally accepted in earth science and seismology. The surface of the earth is divided into rigid tectonic plates that move on the earth surface at extremely slow speed. The islands of Japan sit on the North American and Eurasian plates. The Pacific plate moves westward and the Philippines plate moves to northwest direction; both plates sink under the islands ...

The Chinese event-driven observations and disaster assessment system is established so as to make information related to environmental risk and vulnerability easily accessible to decision-makers through this centralized platform. At 7:49 AM on April 14, 2010, an earthquake of 7.1 magnitude collapsed buildings in Yushu County, Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province. For emergenc...