Fukushima Minpo/AFP/Getty Images

Last fall, PM's annual Breakthrough Awards

featured Greg Deierlein and Jerome Hajjar , two engineers who devised a clever way for a building to collapse in on itself—but not fall over—during the rumblings of a major earthquake. To test it out, Deierlein and Hajjar took their system to Miki City, Japan, where the world's largest earthquake simulator resides. But today, what Japan felt was no simulation—a huge 8.9 earthquake hammered the island country and launched tsunamis that destroyed buildings on the Japanese coast and killed people in the hundreds at least.

Unfortunately, Hajjar tells PM today, his and other disaster-proofing technologies are so new that they're still in testing or in very few buildings. But soon, he says, Japan—boasting its traditions of smart building and preparedness that might have saved many lives today—could begin widespread use of these new technologies that to help structures withstand even these largest natural disasters. "There are some progressive practitioners both in the United States and Japan who have been trying out variations on this simultaneously with us," he says. In Japan, Hajjar says, researchers are working on two or three systems that share a lot with his Breakthrough Award-winning design. "They've been exploring this not only for engineered structures, but also non-engineered structures—meaning houses."

For example, he says, Japanese industrial giant Nippon Steel is researching fuses that resemble what he uses—structural connectors that absorb the stress of an earthquake. "They use those to connect different pieces of wood frame construction, in order to focus any damage in those structures into those fuses." In fact, Hajjar says, Nippon recently displayed those fuses in its showroom in Chiba, Japan, "one of the places that got a pretty hard shake today." He emailed the folks at Nippon this morning to see how they were doing, but hadn't heard back when he spoke with PM.

Because of its precarious location in an earthquake-prone zone, Japan has absorbed disaster readiness into its culture, Hajjar says—and into its building codes. "They're shaking almost daily," University of California, Davis engineering professor Boris Jermic says. "So they not only need good codes, they need good enforcement." Japan has that, he says. But while the country has been proactive in its safety demands for new buildings, retrofitting older ones is another matter. Like American private homes, Hajjar says, when Japanese buildings aren't required to be retrofitted they suffer the same kind of disaster vulnerability.

However, Hajjar says, while earthquake-resistant designs show plenty of promise, there's not a lot you can do to stave off the rage of flooding water. There's a tiny community of researchers in the U.S. and around the world who are trying to make buildings tsunami-resistant, he says, but those the scientists have come up with some solid ideas. Honolulu, Hawaii, for instance, has experimented with designs that include a "sacrificial first floor," in which water will run right through it without compromising the building's structural integrity. During today's tsunami warning, some Hawaiian buildings enacted vertical evacuation—meaning the occupants went upward in the building to avoid the floodwaters in the bottom. Tsunami scientists at Oregon State University are also moving on up: They plan to build a test structure standing on pillars in Cannon Beach, Ore., which would become both the town's city hall and an elevated refuge from tsunami waters.

But the true structural danger of a tsunami, according to Jermic, is that the extreme floodwaters are "going to start scouring the foundation." The only defense is to be prepared and protect foundations with concrete or boulders. If a tsunami's destructive power reaches the foundation material of a building or a bridge, he says, "that structure is going to fail."

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