On 17 January 1995, the Japanese city of Kobe was devastated by a . More than 6000 people died. Four years later, Japanese engineers began building the – otherwise known as the world’s biggest shaking table.
In 2009, four years after its completion, photographer visited the facility, at the in Tsukuba.
The table measures 20 metres by 15 metres, and can take a load of up to 1200 tonnes. It moves by up to 2 metres per second in all three dimensions, its motion driven by a huge system of pressurised oil pipes. By mimicking the shaking provoked by an earthquake, it tests building materials and structures. Modern buildings are far more resistant to earthquakes than older designs because of experiments carried out on the platform.
Vaughan returned to Japan in March 2011. He wanted to photograph parts of the main island that had been scoured by a vast tsunami some 300 years earlier, in 1700. On 11 March, he was in the Tohoku district when a magnitude-9 earthquake triggered another enormous wave. Suddenly, instead of documenting a healed landscape, Vaughan found himself .
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Thousands of lives were lost in that wave, but it could have been worse. “The human toll is terrible,” says Vaughan, “but improvements in engineering saved a lot of lives.”
