The Japanese and American engineers stood atop a tsunami “refuge hill” near Sendai, Japan, and looked across an endless, muddy landscape of structures wrecked by the March 11 tsunami. One of the investigators stretched a long measuring pole into a surviving tree. Its branches apparently had been broken by a massive stone monument—commemorating a previous tsunami of 77 years ago—that was launched from its hilltop pedestal by the latest tsunami. “Three meters,” he said, indicating how much higher the water must have been than the hill. “About 10 feet.”
The 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami that devastated northeast Honshu Island left 14,775 people dead and 10,706 missing. However, it also left an unprecedented wealth of data about how structures and societies respond to the loads of extreme earthquakes and tsunamis. To mine that data, the American Society of Civil Engineers is sending a series of seven expert reconnaissance teams to join their counterparts in the Japan Society of Civil Engineers to gather evidence.