A TOKYO EARTHQUAKE?

WHAT IF TOKYO IS HIT BY MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE?

International Business Times, April 10, 2011

Imagine if more than 10,000 people dead, 100,000 injured, one million buildings destroyed, many millions forced to evacuate and one-fifth of the Japanese economy wiped out.

That's the scenario forecast if a huge magnitude 7.3 earthquake hits Japan's capital of Tokyo, a disaster experts say has a 70 percent risk of occurring over the next 30 years.

Tokyo planners have been working for decades to mitigate the damage from a quake of that scale and the country has some of the world's strictest quake-resistance building standards.

But a month after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake -- the biggest in Japan's recorded history -- and huge tsunami devastated northeast Japan, some say it's time to prepare for far worse.

Tokyo had a tiny taste of what would happen when the March 11 quake, its epicenter about 300 km (180 miles) northeast, halted trains, stranded commuters, snarled phone communication, caused power shortages and within hours saw stores stripped of daily necessities such as bread and milk.

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