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Measuring Personal Damage in a Large-Scale Disaster: A Review of the Reports Published by the Japanese Fire and Disaster Management Agency on the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2022

Mari Kinoshita Open the ORCID record for Mari Kinoshita [Opens in a new window]  and
Mikifumi Shikida
Mari Kinoshita*
Affiliation:
University of Kochi Faculty of Nursing, Ike, Kochi, Japan
Mikifumi Shikida
Affiliation:
Kochi University of Technology, Tosa Yamada, Kami, Kochi, Japan
*
Corresponding Author: Mari Kinoshita, Email: kinoshita@cc.u-kochi.ac.jp.
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Abstract

Objective:

The study’s aim is to identify the challenges in estimating personal damages in the early stages of a disaster.

Methods:

The study reviewed personal damage data in the reports on the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami published by Japanese public agencies from 2011 to 2020, including 159 situation reports by the Fire and Disaster Management Agency and 17 disaster-related indirect death reports by the Reconstruction Agency. The study compared the reported number of deaths, missing persons, and injuries with the latest statistics to evaluate how soon the disaster’s real damages were estimated.

Results:

The reported number of deaths significantly increased in the first 1.5 years, whereas the number of missing persons spiked in the first 30 days. It required approximately 1 year until the numbers approximated the current reference rate. The total casualties included 3739 indirect deaths.

Conclusion:

The results indicated an overestimation of missing persons, a possible underestimation of injuries, and the excess deaths due to indirect causes that complicated the estimation. The limitations of the current data collection approaches are the delay in reporting from the field and incomplete and unreliable information. A novel system is proposed, which directly collects data from all affected individuals anonymously.

Keywords

disaster-related indirect deathspersonal damagerapid health assessment
Type
Original Research
Information
Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness , Volume 16 , Issue 5 , October 2022 , pp. 2056 - 2064
Copyright
© Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc. 2022

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