In the 1995 Kobe earthquake, most deaths occurred because:

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Question restatement: In the 1995 Kobe earthquake, most deaths occurred because:

Option A) fires from broken, exploding gas mains
- This option points to fires causing fatalities. While gas line ruptures can occur in earthquakes, the Kobe event is more notoriously linked to structural and ground failure rather than a dominant series of gas-fueled fires. So this alone would not account for most deaths.

Option B) ground liquefaction
- Ground liquefaction occurs when saturated soils lose strength during shaking, causing ground failure, settling, and movement of infrastructure. This can lead to collapses of buildings and roads. In Kobe, liquefaction contributed to widespread damage and casualties by undermining foundations and freeing buried or unsafe structures.

Option C) collapse of roofs constructed with heavy tiles
- Heavy tile roof collapses historically cause fatalities, especially in older structures. However, in Kobe, while some collapses occurred, this factor alone did not explain the majority of deaths across the city, which experienced more systemic failures related to ground conditions and major infrastructure blocks.

Option D) freeway collapse
- Freeway collapse is a dramatic and visible casualty mechanism in Kobe, where elevated expressways and overpasses failed, trapping people and hindering rescue. This contributed significantly to fatalities, as some collapsed roadways blocked access and caused additional collapses or entrapment.

Option E) both A and C
- Combining fires from gas mains with heavy-tile roof collapses suggests a dual pathway of fatalities. While each could contribute, this pairing does not capture the dominant, citywide causes identified in the event analysis, which emphasized ground-based failures and large infrastructure collapses rather than primarily fires or tile-roof collapses.

Option F) both B and D
- This option combines ground liquefaction and freeway collapse. Ground liquefaction explains widespread, uneven ground performance that damaged many buildings and buried or destabilized foundations, while freeway collapse reflects a major, highly lethal infrastructure failure that trapped or killed many occupants and impeded emergency response. Taken together, these two mechanisms align with the major patterns observed in Kobe: widespread ground failure plus significant infrastructure collapse leading to a large number of fatalities.

Summary reasoning: Across the options, the most consistent and encompassing explanation for the majority of deaths in the Kobe earthquake centers on how shaken, water-saturated soils liquefied, undermining buildings and infrastructure, and how large-scale structural failures on important transportation routes (freeways) compounded the casualty count. The combination of ground liquefaction with freeway collapse (Option F) captures both the ubiquitous geotechnical failure and the dramatic infrastructure disasters that were decisive in the fatalities. The other options describe contributing factors or specific incidents but do not, on their own or in the single-pair combination of A/C, match the scale and distribution of deaths seen in Kobe.

GEO 1030-090 Fall 2025 Module 13: Quiz

In the 1995 Kobe earthquake, most deaths occurred because:

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