活動紹介

This year, on November 2nd, a group of 9 students from the Risk Management II class headed to Osaka Tsunami/Storm Surge Disaster Prevention Station. The field trip oriented by Prof. Nakahara and supervised by Ms. Mai aimed to identify the strategies implemented in Japan to prevent tsunamis and earthquakes situations.
During our stay at the Tsunami/Storm Surge Disaster Prevention Station, we watched some videos that demonstrated the effects of tsunamis and earthquakes in Japan, especially in Osaka, as well as the required survival procedures. According to Station, over the years changes in the Osaka landscape, such as increase of the land creating areas below the sea level and Japan’s geographic location created the perfect atmospheric condition for tsunamis, typhoons, or earthquakes.
To overcome the atmospheric conditions cited above, the Japanese government requires its people to learn survival techniques and always tracks and improves the measures to mitigate and prevent situations caused by tsunamis.

In this way, in Japan the combination of advanced technologies to prevent tsunamis, such as dikes, floodgates protection to stop the ingression of storm into urban areas, it also uses traditional technologies (picture on the left) implemented by the flood fighting corps to mi tigate casualties.

The flood fighting corps made by local citizens practice traditional flood fighting techniques by using regular resources like sandbags and bamboo poles, which reduces financial costs and covers a bigger extension of land preventing the water from creating major damages in other locations.
This field trip allowed me to understand the effects of natural disaster on a population and ways to prepare for those types of adversities. In Angolan, we a have a saying “If you think on the evil, it`ll happen.” This saying used in everyday conversations, even in the government leads us to overlook risks in education, economics, or health sector. So, from this trip, my takeaways are, (i) Prepare for disasters because it reduces the number of casualties, (ii) Invest in human resources not only in experts who implement the procedures but also in the community that will follow the procedures, (iii) It is important to have several strategies to solve a single problem.