Abstract
The 2011 Great East-Japan Earthquake that occurred on March 11, 2011 caused large-scale and wide range fire damage. Also, this earthquake showed a distinctive feature such that there were quite many fires caused by tsunami directly and/or indirectly in the regions, which were more or less affected by the tsunami. Therefore, the authors refer these fires to “tsunami-induced fires” in this paper. On the other hand, regarding the fires in the cities and towns that do not have coastal zone and were not affected by tsunami, we treated them as “earthquake-induced fires.” Since the mechanism of occurrence of “tsunami-induced fires” differs largely from that of “earthquake-induced fires,” we think these two types of fires should be analyzed separately. In this paper, therefore, we describe the overview of fires following the Great East-Japan Earthquake such as regional distribution of fires and patterns of ignitions. Also presented are the findings from the results of the analysis on the relation between the incidence of “earthquake-induced fires” and the seismic intensity.
