[H-DS09] Lirteracy for Disaster Risk Reduction

[HDS09-08] Possibilities and limitations of a community-based tsunami evacuation scheme in Nishiki, Taiki Town, Mie Prefecture, Japan

*Makoto Takahashi¹, Kenji Muroi¹, Tsugio Nakaseko (1.Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University)

Keywords:Tsunami evacuation, Disaster risk reduction, Community-based , Nishiki, Taiki Town, Mie Prefecture

Although the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake did not cause any serious human damage from the tsunami, it once again highlighted the difficulty of tsunami evacuation. In recent years, academic research on tsunami damage and evacuation behavior has progressed, and improvements have been made to the advanced tsunami warning system and hazard maps, but the biggest problem in tsunami disaster prevention remains unsolved: why people do not evacuate. Going back about 20 years, in the late night of September 5, 2004, the earthquake off the southeast coast of the Kii Peninsula occurred, and despite the Japan Meteorological Agency issuing a tsunami warning, the average evacuation rate in the relevant areas of Mie Prefecture was about 6%. However, in the Nishiki district of Taiki Town, the proportion of evacuees among residents in the expected inundated area at that time was recorded at over 80%. This area was hit by a tsunami about 6 meters high during the 1944 Showa Tonankai earthquake, which caused major damage, including 64 deaths and 447 houses being swept away or completely destroyed, making tsunami disaster prevention a major issue. At that time, the town was considering the results of the 1993 Hokkaido Southwestern Offshore Earthquake and was trying to establish its own community-based tsunami evacuation scheme, which was based on three pillars: the development of emergency evacuation sites and routes (including the construction of tsunami evacuation towers), the fostering of a disaster culture through thorough evacuation drills, and the development of a local tsunami warning system leaded by the town authority. We have reviewed and reported on this initiative from various perspectives, including seismology and sociology (kimata and Nakaseko 2008; Nakaseko et al. 2008; Takahashi et al. 2008), and it has attracted international attention (e.g., Velotti et al. 2013; León and March 2014; de Oliveira and Fra.Paleo 2014). However, the town authority is forced to start revising parts of the scheme, as it faced common problems faced by rural municipalities in Japan, such as population decline and aging, and industrial slump. In this presentation, we would like to take a closer look at the tsunami evacuation scheme that we once conceptualized as the "Nishiki model," examine its limitations, and consider what solutions are being considered to overcome them.