What Happened in the 15 Seconds of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake: Collapse, Fire, and a Disaster Response System That Failed

On January 17, 1995, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck with its hypocenter about 16 km deep beneath the northern tip of Awaji Island in the Seto Inland Sea. Several faults extend from the hypocenter: to the southwest, the Nojima Fault on the Awaji Island side, and to the northeast, the Suma and Suwayama faults, which run directly beneath downtown Kobe. The rupture spread along these faults. The video explains that because the shaking occurred directly beneath the major city of Kobe, the damage was far greater.

This earthquake was the first to be rated Shindo 7 on the Japan Meteorological Agency's seismic intensity scale. The video gives the scale of the damage as more than 6,400 dead, more than 43,000 injured, about 640,000 homes damaged, and total losses of about 10 trillion yen. The total losses came to well over 10% of Japan's national budget at the time, and the death toll was the highest since the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

As background to the damage, the video points out that Kobe was regarded at the time as an area with low earthquake risk. In addition to the Suma and Suwayama faults, there are other active faults near Kobe, but when each was assessed individually, earthquakes were thought to recur only about every 2,000 years. In reality, however, a major earthquake occurred in which several faults ruptured together. The video sees this as a limitation of active fault assessment at the time and says the city of Kobe was insufficiently prepared for a major earthquake. As an ironic fact, it also mentions that some people had moved to Kobe, another port city, from Yokohama, which had suffered heavy damage in the Great Kanto Earthquake.

The earthquake struck at 5:46:52 a.m. on January 17, 1995, in the early morning while it was still dark. Most of Kobe's 1.52 million residents at the time, as well as people in surrounding cities, were asleep.

According to the video, a defining feature of this disaster was that more than 70% of the victims died of suffocation or crushing as buildings collapsed. The deadliest were wooden houses built before the new seismic standards of 1981.

In many wooden houses, the columns and the sill are held together at the joints. In a strong earthquake directly underneath, the entire building tilts and deforms heavily, and in the process the joints break and the tenons pull out of their sockets. When this happens, the first-floor columns give way in an instant and only the first floor collapses. The video explains that this is how thousands of people were trapped in less than a minute. The hardest-hit area within Kobe was Higashinada Ward, where 1,469 people died.

Fires also broke out frequently in areas with heavy building collapse. In Kobe, as many as 100 fires broke out on the day of the earthquake, killing people who had been trapped in collapsed buildings.

Damage to infrastructure was also severe. On the Hanshin Expressway Kobe Route, 637 of 1,175 piers and 551 of 1,304 girder spans were damaged. Footage of the reinforced concrete elevated highway lying on its side shocked all of Japan. At the time, it was believed that Japan's expressways were sound, but the video says that in reality the adoption of the latest design methods had lagged, and the structures collapsed in an earthquake that exceeded expectations.

Underground, Daikai Station collapsed. More than half of this underground station's columns were completely destroyed, and the road above sank by up to 2.5 m. The cause the video cites is that strong horizontal forces from the surrounding ground severely deformed the station's box-shaped structure, concentrating bending and shear forces on the columns until they could no longer withstand them. Because underground structures tended at the time to be seen as safer than those above ground, this damage reportedly shocked earthquake engineers and design engineers around the world.

There were also many cases of fires breaking out hours after the shaking had stopped. In one district, power was restored about three hours after the earthquake, but by then the gas company had not been able to keep up, and gas was leaking in many places. Many crushed electrical appliances also remained inside the collapsed buildings, and the video explains that the combination of these factors is thought to have caused many fires.

Firefighters also struggled to put out the blazes. In many places, water outages meant fire hydrants could not be used, and firefighting continued using water from distant seas and rivers, and even school swimming pools. But there are accounts that hoses stretched over long distances were run over by vehicles and split, repeatedly halting firefighting efforts.

The video presents the view that the failure to impose traffic controls after the earthquake worsened the chaos in the disaster zone. Vehicles trying to deliver food and other relief supplies flooded the roads heading to Kobe, and at one point the traffic jam stretched as far as Himeji. Because of this congestion, fire engines and heavy rescue equipment could not reach the sites, and as a result many lives were lost.

The response by the national and local governments was also badly delayed. For more than four hours after the earthquake, neither the fire services headquartered in Tokyo nor even Hyogo Prefecture had a grasp of the damage. Under the law at the time, the Japanese government in Tokyo could not act without formal communication from the city of Kobe. Kobe, meanwhile, is thought to have been unable not only to grasp the full extent of the damage but even to communicate with the outside world, because telephone lines had been cut. The video says that inflexible laws and various communication problems made the disaster worse.

The Self-Defense Forces were stationed at bases in Himeji and elsewhere, but under the system at the time, it was difficult for them to be fully deployed without a disaster dispatch request from the affected local government, specifically the prefectural governor. For fire and emergency services as well, a rapid, nationwide mutual aid system like today's was not fully in place, and the mechanisms for smoothly requesting and deploying support from other regions were reportedly inadequate.

Furthermore, information sharing between the city of Kobe and the gas company was insufficient, and it took time to shut off the gas supply even as leaks from damaged gas pipes made the fires worse. There is also an account that rescue dogs were brought in from France to search for people under the rubble, but because the local government did not know how to receive rescue dogs, their arrival on site was greatly delayed. The video describes how the systems meant to protect citizens literally became deadly in the disaster.

While public agencies were slow to respond, the video says rescue efforts by ordinary citizens saved many people. Firefighters and police within the disaster area alone were nowhere near enough, and many citizens, themselves disaster victims, used anything they could to try to save others' lives. The video notes that it has even been said that without their efforts, the death toll might have been thousands higher.

A total of 1.8 million volunteers also came from all over the country. In the immediate aftermath, they handled medical care, distribution of food and supplies, checking on the safety of elderly people and others, and running evacuation shelters; as time passed, their roles shifted to allocating supplies, helping people move, repairs, and caring for elderly and disabled people. These activities are credited with giving many survivors courage and hope, and they led to 1995 later being called the "first year of volunteerism."

The video concludes that the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake shattered the assumptions underlying disaster prevention systems. At the time, no one had anticipated that means of communication and transportation both inside and outside the disaster zone would be cut off. From there, Japan built the disaster prevention systems it has today. Seismic assessments of buildings were made mandatory, and the new seismic standards became the benchmark for retrofitting programs. The video says it has become clear that in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, building collapses caused by the shaking itself were markedly fewer than in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.

As of 2026, more than 30 years have passed since the earthquake, and some point out that memories of the time are fading. The video holds that preserving the memory of this disaster for future generations is necessary for disaster prevention. At the Hokudan Earthquake Memorial Park on Awaji Island, where the epicenter was located, the displacement of the Nojima Fault is preserved and displayed just as it was at the time.

Finally, the video returns to the Earthquake Early Warning from the beginning. Trial operation of this system began in 2004, and it was built, the video says, on the sacrifices of those affected by the earthquake and the efforts of many people determined not to let it happen again. The Earthquake Early Warning sounds, and the Shinkansen stops automatically. The video closes by saying that the few precious seconds of warning before the shaking arrives rest on the lessons of the many lives lost in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.