Abstract
After the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, much of the world's effort to defend against tsunami concentrated on tsunami warning and evacuation. The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami led to direct and indirect losses as well as the deaths of many vulnerable members of Japan's coastal communities. This event has resulted in Japan rethinking and revising its design codes for sea defence structures. The new guidance emerging from this process is a valuable resource for other countries re-evaluating their own current mitigation strategies and this paper presents details of this process. The paper starts with the history of sea defence design standards in Japan and explains the process of revision of design guidelines since 2011. Examples of sea defences that failed and have since been rebuilt, observed during the two Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) missions of 2011 and 2013, are also presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of international approaches and their application to nuclear power stations in Japan and the UK.
Highlights
Water causing a major release of radioactive material
It describes the research that has been conducted into the failure mechanisms of key sea defence structures, explains the different levels to which sea defence structures must be built and describes the detailed disaster scenario document that exists for design considerations
Japan's rich history of sea defence design has been enshrined in standards and supplementary manuals
Summary
Water causing a major release of radioactive material. Due to the non-structural measures in place along Japan's vulnerable coastlines i.e. comprehensive warning systems and well-rehearsed evacuation plans, casualty figures were relatively low in comparison to the levels of devastation caused by the tsunami. It describes the research that has been conducted into the failure mechanisms of key sea defence structures, explains the different levels to which sea defence structures must be built and describes the detailed disaster scenario document that exists for design considerations. The paper presents an overview of international approaches to sea defence design, where they exist, including the new American Society of Civil Engineers standard. It concludes by providing details of post-2011 sea defence structures built to protect an existing Japanese nuclear power station at Hamaoka, and the new Hinkley Point C power station in the UK.
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