A Study on Rescue Operations after the Kumamoto Earthquakes: Survey Methodology Development and Site Situation Trend Analysis

<p>It is an urgent issue to build the capabilities for rescue teams for disaster response operations, and efforts has been paid for improving rescue training in Police and Fire departments. For this purpose, detailed information on actual rescue operations are very useful. Aiming to collect detailed information useful for rescue training design and rescue capability building, the authors of this study conducted an extensive survey on the rescue operations of police teams in houses collapsed due to the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes and clarified the situations and aspects in detail, such as damage grade of buildings which became to be the sites for confined space rescues, locations of victims trapped inside the collapsed houses, the scale and shape configurations of spaces inside the collapsed houses, concrete entrapment situations including whether or not victims were being pressed by heavy objects, actual rescue operations procedures, and duration of each rescue process. We also developed a survey methodology for collecting data on rescue operations inside collapsed wooden houses, including development of interview methods using miniature models to reproduce the rescue site situations and development of space-scale-pattern-chart utilizing the interview results which was included in the questionnaire sheet we developed. As the result, we clarified the actual conditions of rescue operations including building collapse damage grades and site situations of entrapments in concrete quantitative data, which were only grasped in abstract expressions before such as “unstable”, “confined”, “buried”, and so on. Our results include useful findings that could be applied in future rescue operations and training, and also, the questionnaire we developed can be utilized as a foundation for continuous data collection and a cross-cutting organization surveys on rescue operation processes.</p>