Four days after what came to be called the Great Hanshin Earthquake, a young Japanese civil engineer who had traveled to Kobe to study earthquake damage stood eying the awesome wreckage of the Hanshin Expressway. The elevated highway's columns had buckled and shattered. Here and there along the route, girders had slipped off their bearings, in one place leaving a bus teetering on the edge. A quarter-mile stretch of the four-lane highway had simply flopped over on its side. "We used to say that Japan's earthquake engineering was the best in the world," the engineer recalled. "I don't think we'll be saying that anymore."
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