Scientific Taiwan Paper; Research on Earthquake Engineering.

On May 4, we went to the NCREE, National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering. It was very interesting for me to know what kind of research they are doing, what kind of technology they use to reduce the damage by the earth quake. I think earth quake is one of the scariest natural disasters because we cannot predict exactly when it comes and also how big it will be.

When I saw the liquefaction phenomenon of the ground, I got goose bumps. It was obvious that if they didn’t use the special construction for buildings, or if they didn’t think about the shape or structure of buildings, it would be easier to be destroyed by the earth quake.

My country, Japan also has had a lot of earth quakes. Some of them were huge and killed many people in the past. Therefore, Japan also has invested a lot of time, energy and money for researching earth quakes. On June in 2008 which was right before I came to Taiwan, there was a big earth quake in Tohoku district which is my hometown. Actually the earth quake was almost same size as the one attacked Sichuan in main land China right before it happened in Japan. Even though the one in Japan was also huge, the damage was really small compare to Sichuan. The reason why there are such big differences is that Japan was well-prepared.

In Japan, “earthquake-proof construction” is regarded as a very important thing for all the buildings. Since earthquake shakes the ground not only horizontally, but also vertically too. Therefore those structures should be able to stand both shocks. There are even laws to punish if they didn’t follow the regulations.

According to the Earthquake Disaster Prevention Research Group, Earthquake Engineering Research Team in Japan, they are researching like estimation method for seismic damage using advanced sensor, Urgent repair methods for bridges that damaged during earthquake, High earthquake resistant structure system, Impact study and disaster mitigation on large-scale earthquake and so forth. Thus, Japan putting their effort not only for predicting earthquake, but also taking precautions and how to fix stuff damaged by earthquakes. There are more and more damages by terrible earthquakes in the world. Even though I cannot do anything directly, but I hope that those researches would be able to help the world.