By Thomas Fuller, Anjali Singhvi, Mika Gröndahl and Derek Watkins
When the shaking started at 5:46 a.m., Yasuhisa Itakura, an architect at a big Japanese construction company in Kobe, was sitting at his desk finishing a report he had toiled over all night. His office swayed, but the books stayed on their shelves and nothing fell off his desk.
“I thought to myself, this earthquake is not that big,” Mr. Itakura said.
It was, in fact, catastrophic. The Great Hanshin earthquake of January 17, 1995, killed more than 6,000 people in and around the industrial port city.
Mr. Itakura had been cushioned from the violence of the earthquake because his three-story office building was sitting on an experimental foundation made from rubber — an early version of an engineering technique called base isolation.
The technique that protected Mr. Itakura’s building is used in roughly 9,000 structures in Japan today, up from just two dozen at the time of the Kobe earthquake. Thousands of other buildings in the country have been fitted with shock-absorbing devices that can greatly reduce damage and prevent collapse.
Chile, China, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Turkey and other countries vulnerable to earthquakes have adopted the technologies to varying degrees.
But with notable exceptions, including Apple’s new headquarters in Silicon Valley, the innovations have been used only sparingly in the United States. Seismic safety advocates describe this as a missed opportunity to save billions of dollars in reconstruction costs after the inevitable Big One strikes.
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