A new original research paper “The effect of seawalls on tsunami evacuation departure in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake” is now available online in Injury Prevention. In this blog post, the authors share more about the background and findings of this work.

Giancarlos Troncoso Parady is assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Tokyo, Department of Urban Engineering. Since 2014 he has been conducting research on evacuation behavior during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Bryan Tran is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In 2017 he worked as a research intern at the University of Tokyo, where he conducted research on tsunami evacuation behavior during the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Stuart Gilmour is professor of bio-statistics at St. Luke’s International University Graduate School of Public Health. Since the 2011 triple disaster he has been conducting research on disaster evacuation and recovery in collaboration with local doctors in Fukushima. 

Note: During the writing of this post, Dr Troncoso Parady stressed that it can be difficult to illustrate the sheer scale of these seawalls, and shared this incredible collection with me – well worth a perusal to get a fuller sense of the magnitude: After the tsunami: Japan’s sea walls – in pictures

If you have ever lived in Japan or other countries in the Ring of Fire, then you are probably used to some shaking, to earthquake alarms in the middle of the night, and maybe tsunami warnings. And perhaps you might have seen the seawalls, these huge concrete structures in the coast, designed to protect coastal towns from tsunami.

Seawalls have been an intrinsic part of the Japanese disaster mitigation strategy, and with good reason. Japan accounts for 20 percent of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater. But while seawalls might help protect cities from tsunami damages, a prompt evacuation is the best way to protect human life. This idea is embodied in the concept of Tendenko, a traditional maxim from the Tohoku region that dictates that one should not stay and help others, but run and save your own life first (Check the link for a discussion on the morals of Tendenko). Tendenko has been identified as the reason for the so-called Kamaishi Miracle, where almost all elementary and junior high school students survived.

But I digress, what I want to talk about today is the possibility that people might get a false sense of security from having these big seawalls in their town, and that this might result in people delaying their evacuation, or even worse, not evacuating at all. Some critics have observed as much and cited testimonial evidence of people speculating that loved ones had not evacuated in the belief that the seawall would protect them. However, this was just anecdotal evidence and we wanted to test this quantitatively.

To do so, we used data from a survey conducted by Japan’s Ministry of Land Infrastructure Transportation and Tourism (MLIT) on survivors of the disaster. In the survey, people were asked about where they were when the earthquake occurred, whether they heard the tsunami warnings, and what they did right after the earthquake. We then used that data to compare the evacuation patterns of those who were near a wall that was higher than the forecast tsunami (we called this an “effective wall”) wave and those who had no wall nearby or were near a wall that was lower than the forecast. We found that people in areas near an “effective wall” were 30% less likely to evacuate promptly than those who did not have an “effective wall” nearby, suggesting some sort of false sense of security in relation to the wall.

Staying put might be a rational decision if you are 100% sure that the tsunami forecast is accurate, and the wave will not overcome the wall. However, forecasts of rare events that happen once in a thousand years are not very reliable even with the latest technologies, and the larger the underestimation of the tsunami height the more you expose to risk if deciding when to (or whether to) evacuate based on the tsunami forecast. In fact, the tsunami height estimates were considerably underestimated in the first warnings and revised later on.

These findings underscore the importance of disaster education programs such as the one in Kamaishi City that emphasize proactive evacuation decisions over reliance on predefined risk assumptions, and the validity of the traditional wisdom of a region historically ravaged by large tsunamis, which can be put simply in two words: “evacuate now!”