Evacuation

Community evacuation measures should be
the centerpiece of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) systems.
Because the Sanriku region has suffered from frequent
tsunamis, its local communities have passed their knowledge
from generation to generation, mainly by constructing
commemorative monuments and by conducting education and
drills. Nevertheless, about 20,000 people died or are
missing as a result of the catastrophic tsunami on March 11,
2011. Various factors, such as underestimating tsunami
heights in warnings and on hazard maps, as well as a lack of
awareness, influenced the number of human lives lost. Since
neither the local governments nor the electric power company
had prepared properly for possible nuclear accidents,
evacuation from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power station was chaotic. Because predictions and
other measures to foresee or prevent potential disasters are
often unreliable, community evacuation measures should be at
the center of DRM systems. Local governments conduct tsunami
evacuation drills every year on days commemorating past
large scale tsunamis, and residents learned how to evacuate
safely and quickly from their own houses to designated
shelters. Certain issues had been identified in evacuation
measures even before the March 11 disaster. Public awareness
about the possibility of a tsunami disaster had decreased
since large-scale damage had not been sustained in many years.