A huge earthquake in the country’s industrial heartland — costing as much as 40 per cent of GDP and disrupting supply chains — is seen as inevitable. Understanding the risk and reducing damage is critical. The nightmare for Yoshiaki Kawata would start at midnight with a huge earthquake under the waters of Suruga Bay. Most people in the coastal cities of Fuji,
Shizuoka and Hamamatsu in Japan’s Tokai region would be at home asleep as their homes begin to shake from tremors far stronger than those that struck the Tohoku region in 2011. Five minutes later, a 10m tsunami arrives. “People in houses will be hurt by [the] shaking and then a tsunami coming,” says Mr Kawata, an earthquake expert and professor of safety science at Kansai University. Hundreds of thousands of people could die. READ MORE
