Following discussions in the wake of the March 11 quake and tsunami, an experts' panel of the Central Disaster Management Council submitted its final report to post-disaster reconstruction minister Tatsuo Hirano in late September. The report called on the central and local governments to drastically review their disaster prevention programs to prepare for future large-scale quakes and tsunami.
The panel stressed that Japan from now on should take into account the strongest-class quakes whose probability is once in a thousand years as well damage to high-rise buildings, oil-storage tanks and other structures caused by long-cycle vibrations, fires or ground liquefaction in locations more remote from earthquake epicenters.
It has pointed out that tsunami can be caused not only by quakes that occur in the Japan Trench such as the March 11 temblor but also by quakes caused by an oceanic plate shifting beneath a continental plate. It also called for assuming that a magnitude 8-class quake, rather than a magnitude 7-class quake, would occur beneath the Tokyo area, and that massive quakes would strike simultaneously or consecutively off Shizuoka Prefecture, the Kii Peninsula and Shikoku.