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What
Can Seattle Learn From Kobe
Junko Anazawa
Koichi
Kobayashi
Introduction
Five years have passed since the major earthquake struck the
Hanshin-Awaji area of Japan.
Since then, the world has seen the people's endeavor to recover from the
disaster and to rebuild their cities and their neighborhoods. For us, who
live and work in Seattle,
the lesson of the earthquake thousands miles away cannot be ignored. Being a
sister city to Kobe, Seattle shares with her the geography of
sitting on the land where a massive ground shake can take place. Just like Kobe, Seattle is a major
international port city with modern and densely populated industrial and
commercial areas; Seattle possess all aspects
of a city that Kobe
had and lost in the disaster.
Kobe proved how vulnerable a city can be against the power of
nature. But she also gave us valuable lessons during her course of recovery and
reconstruction efforts, in how to build a strong and sustainable city against
major disasters. Now is the time for Seattle people to revisit the experience
of Hanshin earthquake and re-examine our city as to how well we are prepared
and what we should do now to make the city strong against disasters.
Are we prepared?
First, I would like to take a close look at Seattle’s preparedness. There are three
major points to be addressed.
The City of Seattle
has an office called Division of Emergency Management, which specifically
focus on emergency safety issues. They provide guidelines for citizens on how
to respond in major disaster situations and how to secure their safety. They
have also formulated "Coordinated Response Plan", in which the
city, along with police and fire, work from a centralized headquarter to
provide rescue and support to citizens throughout the city.
In the presense of the city’s effort, it is still questionable
how effective and sufficient the centralized rescue measures would be. The Hanshin
earthquake has clearly proved that mutual cooperation within a neighborhood
is more important than the govenmental effort in an emergency situation.
Therefore, the City of Seattle
is trying to promote SDART (Seattle Disaster Aid & Response Teams), which
is a neighborhood-oriented approach to emergency preparedness. The City
supports neighborhoods to form SDART groups (which usually consist of 25-50
households), and assists each group’s practice ib building its skill of
mutual help. Right now about 270 SDART groups exist in Seattle, but it covers only about 1% of the
total population.
Another seismic hazard consideration within the city is in
regulations in land development and building permit process. The City sets
standards for the strength and stability of building structures by using the
Universal Building Code. When it comes to site planning at large, the city
has "Environmentally Critical Areas", which specify the areas where
development needs to be regulated for protecting critical areas for city’s
environment. For seismic hazard related items, landslide prone areas and
liquefaction prone areas are mapped out.
What are the problems? What do we need now?
Now, we ask ourselves a question "Is our city prepared
enough?" The answer will be "no".
Comparing to the level of emergency safety measures that Kobe or other cities of Japan
are trying to achieve, Seattle
is still under developed. What then are our problems and what should we do
now?
One major factor of Seattle’s
ill preparedness is citizens' lack of awareness to seismic hazards, the
citizens don’t have any recent memory of major earthquakes in the Puget Sound
Area. There is a striking contrast between Seattle
citizens and the people in major cities of Japan, where earthquakes have
always been threats, and people are forced to prepare themselves to protect
their lives from possible destruction. In Seattle, geographers and seismologists have
been studying the likeliness of earthquakes in this region and the danger of
it. Graphically portraying these studies and making them accessible to the
citizens will be effective tool to increasing the awareness of the people so
that they can build mental checklists of preparedness.
Aside from the public awareness issue, problems can be
addressed in the city’s disaster management plan, which is designed to be
very centralized and which depend heavily on the government police and fire
departments. It important that the city has overall schemes and it is they
which will play an integral part in emergency safety operation. However, we
need to count on each neighborhood’s cooperative effort in securing life and
safety of every single person. Therefore, SDART-like system that will help
build a structure of mutual support within a community, and provide chances
to learn who live around you and what kind of resources you have is very
valuable. It should be promoted more aggressively so that it will cover all
the Seattle
neighborhoods. Remember, in Kobe
immediately after the quake, neighbors helped neighbors.
While depending on neighborhood’s efforts, the local
government does have the responsibility of planning and building
infrastructure that can serve to accomplish the city’s sustainability against
disasters. The City is already working on this effort by enforcing building
codes and setting environmentally critical area regulations. However it seems
that the city has not included the idea of emergency safety in its long term
planning of its growth and development. Kobe,
on the other hand, building physical infrastructure or environment to serve
emergency safety of the city is one of the major backbones of their overall
planning schemes.
Kobe’s effort can be addressed in three major points; 1) to
introduce multi-functional environment that can serve both daily and emergency
situations. 2) to provide neighborhood scale ‘anti-disaster base’ all
throughout the city. 3) to build networks to connect neighborhood bases that
are to be coupled with park and open space system.
Multi-functional environment for both daily and emergency
situation means a space is not only for the people’s amenity, but also place
to serve citizen’s safety in emergency situations. For instance, a public
park can be designated as an area where people can evacuate from unsafe
structures, gather to wait for rescues or exchange support when disaster
strikes, It can also store equipments and fire fighting water.
Providing neighborhood scale bases is planned in Kobe, they plan to use
schools or parks as local emergency operation hub. That’s where rescue, manpower,
information, and goods from the central point are gathered and distributed to
people in the community. Similar concept exists in Seattle's planning where they are seeing
local community centers as emergency temporary shelters. It is also important
to incorporate facilities for emergency water and energy.
Making networks throughout the city provides connections
between the central emergency operation headquater and local hubs. These can
be independent from any vehicular network. Kobe is trying to make use of riverfront,
waterfront, pedestrian corridors to establish emergency network paths, which
are also developed as amenity space to be used by citizens in normal
situations. Seattle,
too, can introduce this concept by taking advantage of our own geographical
feature or existing infrastructure, to build this kind of network that is
also used by pedestrian and bicyclists for their pleasures.
Conclusion
As a conclusion, what Kobe
is teaching us is that the effort of building sustainable city against natural
disaster is a product of mutual cooperation between the government and
citizens. While the government is responsible in building an overall system
and infrastructure for emergency safety, citizens need to take part in this
process by providing advocacy, leadership, and cooperation to secure the
safety of your community.
Finally, as a landscape architect, I would like to see my
profession’s role in this endeavor is to contribute our expertise to create
the environment, which is not only aesthetic and recreational, but also
functional so that it can serve the well-being and safety of the people.
Thank you.
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