On Friday, thousands of people commemorated the 30th anniversary of the earthquake that destroyed parts of Kobe, Japan, and killed over 6,400 people.
In the island nation that experiences around one-fifth of the strongest tremors in the globe, the 7.2-magnitude earthquake on January 17, 1995, led to a significant review of earthquake preparedness.
When the second-deadliest earthquake to hit Japan since World War II slammed the port city at 5:46 a.m., mourners observed a moment of silence before daylight.
“Whenever I see someone who looks like one of them, I feel it might be one of them,” a man who lost his mother and sister in the disaster told public broadcaster NHK.
“I’ve been living like this for 30 years,” he said.
While fires blazed through collapsed timber houses, the earthquake trapped people in thousands of crushed buildings and uprooted rail tracks and highway overpasses.
Kobe’s economy suffered greatly as a result of the extensive damage to the crowded harbor region, which led to a population exodus in the months and years that followed.
Over 1,000 earthquakes occur in Japan annually. Even while the great majority are innocuous, a few huge ones can occasionally result in significant harm and fatalities.
A massive tsunami struck the northeast coast in 2011 after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, killing almost 18,000 people and igniting the greatest nuclear disaster in a generation.
After a massive earthquake on New Year’s Day last year that devastated homes and infrastructure and killed almost 500 people, the Ishikawa region is still having difficulty recovering.
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