SPECIFICALLY SPEAKING | ENVIRONMENTAL
FALLOUT
from Japan
A Foreseeable, Yet Unforeseen, Catastrophe?
Some Lessons for the United States
By Joshua S. Lichtenstein and John T. Carty
The catastrophic events in Japan have created the world’s gravest nuclear cri- sis since Chernobyl 25 years ago. Although the full extent
of the environmental damage may not be
known for years, Japan is already experiencing a variety of potentially detrimental
consequences — including heightened radiation levels detected in food supplies, in
the Tokyo water supply and in the seawa-ter near the Fukushima complex.
Could the Tokyo Electric Power Company
(TEPCO) have been better prepared for
this natural disaster? News articles have
reported that TEPCO officials knowingly
8 | LitigationManagement | summer 2011
discounted the potential risk of, and the
resulting damage from, a magnitude 9.0
earthquake and the resulting tsunami de-
spite prior analysis that showed it was a
real possibility. In a 2001 analysis of the
Jogan tsunami that occurred in the year
869, scientists estimated that the Jogan
tsunami caused waves as high as 26 feet to
crash ashore only 25 miles north of where
the Fukushima facility is situated. The 2001
analysis also documented two additional
tsunamis comparable in size to Jogan that
occurred within the past 3,000 years and
consequently concluded that this reoccur-
rence interval of approximately 1,000 years
and the passage of more than 1,100 years
since the Jogan tsunami indicated that
“the possibility of a large tsunami striking
the Sendai plain is high.” Yet a more recent
TEPCO analysis postulated that the larg-
est tsunami that could threaten the area of
the Fukushima facility would not exceed
18 feet in height.
News reports have also indicated that
TEPCO officials based their plant safety
analysis on an assumption that the strongest earthquake that could strike the region would not exceed 8.6 in magnitude.
TEPCO’s assumption appears to have ignored known data documenting the occurrence of earthquakes at least 9.0 in magnitude within the past 50 years in subduction zones located in Chile, Indonesia and
