The Kobe earthquake strikes Japan

At 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck beneath Kobe, Japan, on a shallow fault running through one of the country’s most densely built regions. The shaking lasted only about 20 seconds, but that was enough.

Known in Japan as the Hyogoken-Nanbu or Great Hanshin earthquake, it killed more than 6,000 people and injured tens of thousands more. Fires touched off by the quake swept through neighborhoods, and over 150,000 buildings were destroyed. Elevated highways toppled onto their sides, and railways and port facilities were wrecked, leaving some 300,000 people homeless.

The disaster was a hard lesson for a nation that prided itself on earthquake-resistant design. Economic losses ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the slow, tangled emergency response pushed Japan to overhaul its building codes, disaster planning, and volunteer networks for the quakes still to come.