Thaindian News

Washington/Tokyo, March 12 (IANS) Being a world leader in constructing buildings that can withstand severe shakings during a quake helped Japan after it was hit by a temblor measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, said experts.

The Washington Post said that massive shock absorbers and walls that slide helped ensure that medium- and high-rise structures in Japan remained standing following the country’s largest earthquake, which triggered a huge tsunami.

Japan learnt from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and became a global leader in engineering new structures and retrofitting old ones to withstand it.

“The Japanese are at the forefront of seismic technology,” Eduardo Kausel, a professor at MIT, was quoted as saying.

“All modern structures have been designed for earthquakes.”

The Japanese have stringent rules for short, medium and tall buildings, said another expert.

Ron Hamburger of the engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz and Heger in San Francisco pointed out that new buildings shorter than three storeys are required to have reinforced walls and foundation slabs of a certain thickness.

There is much more intensive engineering in mid-rise buildings while high-rise structures have innovative earthquake-resistant designs that undergo review by the country’s top structural engineers.

Mid-rise buildings often rest on huge rubber or fluid-filled shock absorbers. The huge absorbers slide side to side, dissipating lateral motion and turning it into heat.

“They allow quite a bit of movement,” said another expert.

On Friday when the quake struck, the tall buildings wavered but didn’t collapse.

The media report said that hollow walls hiding sliding metal plates were common in recently built mid- and high-rise buildings in Japan.