Investigation of the Gasoline Supply Problem in the Great East Japan Earthquake and Application To Future Earthquakes

Abstract eng:
The Great East Japan Earthquake exerted serious damage over an unprecedentedly wide range. The earthquake prevented the supply of materials indispensable to restoration and revival in its aftermath, including fuels such as gasoline. In this study, we apply a system dynamics solution to investigate the causes and bottlenecks of this problem in order to ameliorate similar problems in wide-ranging disasters that are expected to occur, such as the Huge Nankai Trough Quake. According to data and information provided by the Agency of Natural Resources and Energy and interviews with workers at the JX Sendai oil refinery, we determined the following bottlenecks in gasoline supply in the damaged areas: (1) the number of tank lorries transporting gasoline from the oil refinery and oil terminal to the SSs was insufficient. (2) The standard number of tank lorry roundtrips per day was three, but damage to lorry racks at the oil refineries or oil terminals could decrease the number of tank lorry roundtrips. Based on these points, we considered how the system dynamics model we formulated based on the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake could be applied to the future, expected Huge Nankai Trough Quake. We determined the influence of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the expected Huge Nankai Trough Quake according to damage to (a) supply sources and (b) supply routes. In the case of the Huge Nankai Trough Quake, western Japan has more oil refineries and other advantages than did the Tohoku region during the Great East Japan Earthquake in view of (a) supply sources. However, in view of (b) supply routes, roads in western Japan have no redundancy and damaged roads may be a bottleneck in disasters; this is a matter of concern. By considering these results, the method to estimate a supply delay of gasoline for a hypothetical earthquake was proposed. In this method, we developed vulnerability functions of oil refineries which took into account both ground shaking and tsunami force simultaneously. To improve the system dynamics model, integrating the road restoration ratio with parameters such as the tank lorry roundtrips per day is necessary.

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