Abstract
In the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, a large-scale effort towards reconstruction of houses damaged by the quake was required. This led to increased mortgage, thereby financially plaguing a number of earthquake victims and inhibiting their long-term sustainability and self-supported recovery. The current framework of housing reconstruction assistance provided by the Japanese government does not account for regional disparities in cost and other socioeconomic factors. This study proposes a technique for estimating the cost of reconstructing household units damaged in an earthquake by considering the effects of construction methods influenced by regional climatic zones. The financial constraints on rebuilding resources have been estimated by considering the annual regional income and household savings, as determined by social factors and employment opportunities. The susceptibility of regions to the occurrence of earthquakes has also been factored in the calculation of recovery costs. Together, these factors are used to provide a more complete picture of economic costs associated with earthquake recovery in different regions of Japan, thereby revealing large disparities in the difficulty and financial burden involved in the reconstruction of household units. Results of this study could be used to develop a robust system for earthquake-recovery assistance that accounts for differences in recovery costs between different regions, thereby improving the speed and quality of post-earthquake recovery.
Highlights
A significant portion of costs associated with earthquake recovery gets utilized in the reconstruction of damaged houses
The prominence of the so-called “double loans” in the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake added to existing mortgages and financially plagued many earthquake victims, thereby inhibiting their sustainable, long-term self-supported recovery
When using Equation (2), seismic-motion prediction maps provided by the Japan Seismic Hazard Information Station (J-SHIS) [13] were used to calculate the total number of wood-framed houses damaged along with the cost of damage in each municipality
Summary
Minami et al [3], by using results of a survey performed concerning the sense of recovery among residents of the Okushiri Island 20 years after the occurrence of an earthquake and considering the completion of building reconstruction as a rough cutoff point, reported that 42.3% of the survey participants confirmed that they had fully recovered from the earthquake and that household rebuilding and financing thereof were the most important factors of concern during post-disaster life planning Against this background, the Act Concerning Support for Reconstructing Livelihood of Disaster Victims was enacted in Japan in 1998 and the collected tax money was directed towards rebuilding individual damaged homes.
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