Relationship between topographic conditions and damage quantified from “Niigata Earthquake Ground Disaster Map” published in 1964

Abstract

Using the Geographic Information System, the earthquake damage information such as building damage, ground deformation, and sand boil was traced from the “Niigata Earthquake Ground Disaster Map”, and the area and length of each damage were extracted for each 50 m mesh section. Based on the amount of damage, we compared the damage occurrence rate and the damage scale of each mesh for some topographic conditions. As a result, the sand dune land basically had a low damage rate, but there was a large ground damage in the lowland area of the coastal dune. Earthquake damage occurred in whole area of reclaimed land belong in old river channel and that damage scale was considerably large, but the artificial ground between old sand dunes in the southern area had only little damage. In the hinterland and the natural levee area in the former river channel area of the early Edo period, the damage level was the same as the reclaimed land, while the most area originated from land area tended to have a little damage.