The effect and impact in the disaster stricken businesses after the Great East Japan Earthquake — The data of Seismic intensity versus the duration of restoring process

Research outline

In the Great East Japan Earthquake stricken areas, the numerous numbers of businesses were directly affected. At the same time many of the related businesses outside the stricken areas were also indirectly affected resulting in the significant loss of revenue due to the stoppage of production.
This research is conducted by using collected data (the duration of production stoppage and time taken to restore sorted by categories) to analyze the damages and impacts toward the businesses industry. This research is consisted of data showing the duration of the production stoppage and time taken to restore.

The sources are based on the articles of the Bloomberg, Reuters, and Nikkei NET. The data was provided from 128 companies (421 offices, plants). The data is sorted by type of business and ratio of restored companies(%) in time scale to show the tendency.

Research summary

The time taken to be restored for each business varies depending upon its primary factor such as severity of damage in buildings, facilities, lifelines, and status of supply chains, etc. This analysis shows the index of location and seismic intensity scale to determine the relation between the time taken and a seismic shaking.

In this research summary, the shortest time taken to restore is among Electronics Industry, Precision parts Industry, Machinery Industry, Auto and its parts Industry; however the longest time taken to restore is among Food Industry, and Health Care and Pharmaceutical Industry. It is also evident that the tendency of delaying the restoring is indicated among the Chemical Industry and Paper manufacturing Industry if the seismic intensity scale was more than scale 6. Furthermore among all the types of industries, Chemical Industry and Paper manufacturing Industry have a tendency to take longer time to restore due to the complicated issues such as the location of fine chemical production facility, and fabricated material for electronic components production facility. It is determined that if the seismic intensity scale was higher than scale 5, the time taken to restore the above industries was longer due to the technical needs. However a discrepancy in the relationship was identified as the other factors other than the relationship between a seismic intensity scale in Steel and business its interruption period.