High Court ups damages for child deaths in March 2011 tsunami

April 27, 2018

Sendai, Miyagi Pref.- Sendai High Court on Thursday ordered the Miyagi prefectural and Ishinomaki municipal governments to pay a total of some 1,436 million yen in damages to the families of 23 elementary school children killed in the March 2011 tsunami, slightly raising the compensation amount from that set by a lower court.

The higher sum came as the high court newly acknowledged the negligence of defendants to compile antidisaster measures before the tsunami, unleashed by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake that mainly rocked the Tohoku northeastern Japan region on March 11, 2011.

According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, this is the first court ruling recognizing liability concerning anti-disaster measures before the quake and tsunami.

In October 2016, Sendai District Court ordered the prefectural government of Miyagi, part of Tohoku, and the city of Ishinomaki in the prefecture to pay some 1,426 million yen to the bereaved families, finding teachers and other staff employees at Okawa Elementary School, run by the city, liable for the children's deaths.

The district court said the school employees failed to evacuate the children to an appropriate place although they could have anticipated that a massive tsunami would strike some seven minutes before the water reached the school.

Meanwhile, it stopped short of recognizing the negligence of the school or the city in terms of their antidisaster measures, pointing out that it was impossible to foresee the tsunami before the disaster.

The district court ruling was appealed by both the plaintiffs and the defendants. In the lawsuit, the bereaved relatives demanded a total of 2.3 billion yen in damages.

Seventy-four students and 10 staff employees at the school were killed in the tsunami. The victims were hit by the tsunami when they were evacuating toward a street intersection near a river levee.

In hearings at the high court proceedings, the prefecture and the city claimed it was impossible to predict the arrival of the tsunami because the school was not in areas where tsunamis had been expected to strike.

Given the risks of landslides on the mountain behind the school after the huge earthquake, it was reasonable for the school to choose the intersection, which is some 6 meters higher than the school's playground, as an evacuation destination, the defendants also argued.

The bereaved families said the staff employees could not evacuate the children properly because crisis management manuals including detailed evacuation routes had not been created before the disaster, blaming the school and the city for their negligence to take appropriate antidisaster measures in advance.

In the ruling, the high court said the Ishinomaki government had repeatedly instructed the headmaster of the school to review its crisis management manuals since fiscal 2008.

Given that only levees separate a nearby river and the school premises, the court judged that the school, by the April 30, 2010, deadline for revising the manuals, could have foreseen the risk of a tsunami going over the levees and reaching the school.

The children would have been saved if a mountain some 700 meters away from the school had been designated as an evacuation site in the manuals, the court said.

To ensure the safety of students, the headmaster and other officials of Okawa Elementary School were required to have much greater knowledge of and experience in risk management than local residents in the area where the school was located, the court said.

But they failed to check the reliability of the municipal government's tsunami hazard map by themselves when drawing up crisis management manuals, the court said, adding that the Ishinomaki city education board neglected to instruct the school to overhaul the manuals.

Okawa Elementary School was closed earlier this year, following a fall in the number of students. The damaged school facilities will be conserved by the city to pass on lessons from the catastrophe to future generations. Jiji Press