h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: The Kobi (or Kobe) Earthquake - A3328779
Author: royalleothelion (creator of tomato wear and thingite guard of the kings potty) - U998559

My first guide entry submitted to Peer Review

I think this is good.

It will need a fair bit of tidying - you run sentences together and your punctuation is fairly dire, but those are details.

I'd like to see something in it telling us where Kobe is. I'm not familiar with the geography of Japan at all, so it would be nice to know is Kobe a town, a city or a suburb, is it on the East coast or West coast and details like that.

I think you should be more definite in your title. Pick one spelling for Kobe and stick to it. You can put the other in as a footnote if you like.

When you've got those out of the way, I'll list all the boring detailed stuff you need to change to get this tidied. But first, let's see what other people think of it.

Hello Royalleo,

Yes - this is a good entry and definitely a good candidate for the Edited Guide. The name "Kobe" is a more common name for the city, and I think you should standardise the name to Kobe everywhere. You mix the names Kobi and Kobe in many places. Kobe, to my understanding is a city in southern Japan very near Osaka.

Also I would like to see a paragraph on Kobe today or the aftermath of Kobe. Can you find out more about what type of aid programme was put in place, what has been done to prevent another earthquake causing quite the same devastation again?

Cheers,

Woodpigeon

good suggestions I'll work on them now

Hi,

nice start to the entry, but there is a lot more detail i thik you can put in, maybe I'm at an advantage because I had to write an 8-page case study on the earthquake a couple of years ago at school,

but you could talk about what tectonic plates are, how they work, what plates were involoved in the earthquake and what type of boundary it was(destructive, conservative, constructive etc), you can say about how the fires were made worse because the fire brigade couldnt use water (it was cut off by the earthquake)most of the time, and how a lot of people were killed or injured because things fell off shelves or bookcases and landed on them.

you could also add something about how earthquakes are detected and why this one wasn't detected in time,

what about the aftermath, and any aftershocks that occurred, I remember something about tent cities in parks and open spaces because the hospitals were damaged and people didn't want to stay near tall buildings that might fall down, also about how much money it cost the economy and how much to repair damage ( the port, which is quite a major one had to be closed for a while) and about how long it took to rebuild the city, how many houses and other buildings were destroyed etc,

Finally could talk about developments in building structure and earthquake prediction, is devastation on this scale likely to happen again?

This has the bones of a good entry, now you need to fill in the flesh of the article.

Don't be disheartened about my long list of things, you just need to go the extra step to get into the edited guide

Good Luck,

Sam

It could use a little fleshing out, but maybe not that much. For instance, there's already an edited entry about plate tectonics here A884469 so all that's needed is a link to it rather than a description.

A conclusion to the entry outlining what's been learned from the devastation and how much of that has been put into practice would be good


Scout

OK, I'll work on that

what industries were based around kobe, were they affected ?

I can remember fears over a rise in the cost of computer memeory because of the quake .. (back then it was £30 per Mb, oh how times have changed)

One industry is steel. I recall being told a story by a salesman who works for a European steelplant equipment supplier. He flew in the day before the quake, and was in a hotel somewhere in the city when it struck. He was due to go to Kobe Steel later that day. The company actually sent a fax profusely apologising that they wouldn't be able to receive him because they had a few other problems to sort out! It was given to him that same morning too, in a hotel with very few intact windows. (The story was told as an example of Japanese efficiency and meticulous protocol)

Isn't that exhibit in the Science Museum in London a simulation of the Kobe earthquake? (It's a mock-up of a quivering supermarket, accompanied by CCTV footage taken from the store cameras)

Hiya royalleothelion

Just a couple of small points you might like to consider while you're working on the bigger points suggested.

The sentence about the airport being built and Footnote 3 will become 'dated'.

Maybe reword them, possibly state when work started on the building of the airport and the year it's expected to be completed.

Maybe for Footnote 3, something like '10 years later you could still see the remains of several buildings left to be rebuilt'.

Also


January 17, 1995 ~ 17 January, 1995

I notice in your GuideML you have not used any Paragraph tags (</P&gt. It is standard for Edited Entries to have a (opening tag) at the beginning of each paragraph and a (closing tag) at the end of each paragraph.

Only minor details but once your Entry has reached its full potential, and begins its journey to the front page, the time it spends with a Sub-editor is likely to be less if there's less a Sub-editor has to do, plus it makes their job easier.

Emmily

Well done, Pinniped! I've been trying to remember where I experienced that museum mock-up, so I could post the info here - now we know!

Jules

Some nitpicks:

The footnotes should come immediately after the word they refer to, without a space in between.

The paragraph on Transport and Communication is a little muddled.

The famous high speed railway
-->
The famous high-speed railway


Alex

what do you mean, please explain.

Transport and communication:

The second sentence seems incomplete (ie could do with being part of a longer sentence), and the rest of the sentences, apart from the first, are 'simple' instead of 'compound'/'complex', meaning that the paragraph doesn't flow very smoothly.

I think I was being a bit pedantic at the time - it just needs tweaking.

Ok

Hi royalleothelion!

I found a couple of things in this sentence:

'It brought shock around the world that a country so built-up and earthquake ready could still lose 3000 lives2 and leave more than a third of the city's population homeless, because of, what in Japan is classed as a minor earthquake. 3'

You don't need the final comma. Also, do you think earthquake-ready (great phrase!) should have a hyphen?

Are you going to include any reference to the fact that there is a mock-up of the earthquake in a major museum in London? I don't know whether it fits but you may be able to mention it somewhere, to show just how far-reaching the event was.

Jules

I promised to do a detailed proofread of this, so here it is:

Remove the first header, which is "Introduction".

main Island --> main island

an airport was being built at the time I wrote this --> an airport is being built at the time of writing

Kobe --> Kobe

January 17, 1995 --> 17 January, 1995

this one was different, the Epicentre --> this one was different; the epicentre

earthquake ready --> earthquake-ready

because of, what in Japan --> because of what in Japan

Even 10 years later from the quake --> Even 10 years after the quake

Move the fullstop which is just before the third footnote to just after the footnote:

earthquake. --> earthquake
--> .

here --> here.

I've fixed the problems.

As Jules suggests above, it's well worth mentioning the Natural History Museum's earthquake simulator. Apart from that, i think you're there

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