Massive water outage in Tohoku shows need to boost quake resistance

A powerful quake off northeastern Japan last week left up to some 70,000 households without access to water in the region, local authorities said, underlining the urgent need to increase quake-resistant water pipes in the disaster-prone country.Water disruption in Miyagi Prefecture, which impacted about 37,000 homes, was mostly caused by damage to two key water pipes in the region that were more than 40 years old, according to the prefecture. One of them was not quake-resistant, it said.As of March 2021, 40.7 percent of major water pipes in Japan were considered resistant to massive quakes …READ FULL ARTICLE