Global Disaster Prevention

The author teaches a course endowed by JR East on risk management for transportation infrastructure against large-scale disaster damage, running from May 2013 to March 2016. This article will cover an overview of the endowed course while explaining the goals of activities in the course. Provisions against large-scale disasters for social systems have been under review since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Re-inspection and assessment of safety and reliability of those systems have come to be demanded more than ever before, as have appropriate improvements for the future. This endowed course was set up in light of that demand to develop risk analysis methods that will form the basis for effectively improving the reliability of transportation infrastructure such as railways, highways, seaports, and airports against a variety of disasters. Research in the course is being done to overcome that issue of making improvements. For example, consider line sections along mountain slopes where landslides often occur. People in charge of disaster prevention deal with issues such as whether digging a tunnel for a separate line would be more cost effective in the long run, enhancing protective equipment for the current line would be better, or installing landslide warning devices would be sufficient. It would be so convenient if there were software that could output the appropriate decision-making instructions automatically if the necessary data was input. Of course, everyone involved in actual work in this field knows that is merely a fantasy.