The Tohoku, Japan, Tsunami of March 11, 2011: Effects on Structures

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has sponsored several reconnaissance teams to survey effects of the great East Japan earthquake and Tohoku tsunami. The irst of these was the tsunami team, which traveled to Japan from April 15 to May 1, 2011, and focused on tsunami effects on coastal buildings, bridges, port facilities and coastal protective structures. All seven members of the team are on the ASCE 7 Subcommittee on Tsunami Loads & Effects, formed in January 2011 to draft a chapter for potential inclusion in the 2016 edition of ASCE 7, Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures. The multidisciplinary structural/coastal/ hydraulics/ geotechnical engineering team was made up of the following: Gary Chock, Martin & Chock Inc. (team leader and chair of the ASCE 7 Subcommittee on Tsunami Loads & Effects); Ian Robertson, University of Hawaii; David Kriebel, U.S. Naval Academy; Ioan Nistor, University of Ottawa; Mathew Francis, URS Corp.; and Daniel Cox and Solomon Yim, Oregon State University. The team was accompanied by Japanese researchers and practitioners, including Tomoya Shibayama, Waseda University (chair of the Ocean Engineering Committee of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers); other team members came from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Yokohama National University, Saitama University, Takenaka Corporation, and the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University. Members of the team were able to visit over 45 towns and cities from Hachinohe in the north to Katsuura in the south—the entire Tohoku coastline except for the 80-km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.