The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity. “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that much destruction,” says Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor at MIT who specializes in disaster resilience. Even in a country like Japan, with advanced engineering, and policies in place to update safety codes, natural forces can…
