Drill Conducted Using New Info Scheme on Nankai Trough Quakes

May 7, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's land ministry conducted on Monday the first drill using a new emergency information system to release alerts on the possibility of a major earthquake occurring in the Nankai Trough off the country's Pacific coast.

The ministry and its regional development bureaus checked the procedures to be taken in the event of an earthquake that may be followed by a larger main tremblor.

The drill was conducted under the assumption that a magnitude-7 level foreshock occurred off the Shima Peninsula in central Japan, prompting the Japan Meteorological Agency to issue an alert about a possible main shock under the new system, which started in November last year.

Participants checked procedures for closing floodgates and restoring quake-affected roads under the scenario that the foreshock was followed by a magnitude-9 level main earthquake off the Kii Peninsula in western Japan.

In a drill meeting of the disaster control headquarters at the ministry, land minister Keiichi Ishii instructed officials to continue monitoring the situation closely and provide information to local residents and related institutions appropriately.

A special law on responses to large-scale earthquakes presupposes that a so-called Tokai earthquake, a possible powerful temblor in the Tokai central region, can be predicted and calls for taking measures including traffic controls and resident evacuations. But the government has no immediate plan to implement such measures due to the difficulty of making precise predictions of earthquakes.

Instead, the meteorological agency introduced the new emergency information system to warn related institutions about a possible main trembler in the event of a magnitude-7 or -8 level earthquake in the epicentral area of Nankai Trough tremblors. Jiji Press