Overview of Fires Following the Great East-Japan Earthquake

Abstract

The Great East-Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 actually caused large-scale and wide range fire damage. It may be said that the fire damage was equivalent or even larger in size and diversity of fire patterns, if comparing to the fire damages in the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake. Also, this earthquake showed a distinctive feature such that there were quite many caused by directly and/or indirectly. As many of that occurred in the cities and towns, where there are coastal zone, were more or less affected by the tsunami, so we deemed them as tsunami induced-fires for the sake of convenience in the paper. On the other hand, the in the cities and towns, where there are not coastal zone, were not affected by tsunami, so we treated them as earthquake-induced Since the mechanism of occurrence of tsunami-induced fires differs largely from earthquake-induced fires, we think these two types of should be analyzed separately. In this paper, therefore, we describe the overview of following the Great East-Japan Earthquake such as regional distribution of and patterns of ignitions of both the above two types of fires. Also presented are the findings from the results of the analysis on the relation between the incidence of earthquake-induced fires and the seismic intensity in comparison with the data in the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake.