DEVASTATING JOLT IN JAPAN : Visiting Experts Stunned by Lack of Preparedness : Services: Earthquake engineers say the total breakdown of emergency coordination cost lives.

OSAKA, Japan —  Eighty Japanese and American earthquake engineers, who happened to be meeting here when the Kobe earthquake struck just 20 miles west, sharply criticized Japan’s lack of preparedness, poor emergency coordination and even the failure of news media to advise people on what to do in the wake of the temblor.

The experts toured the most devastated parts of Kobe on Thursday and then gave a series of reports expressing shock at what they had seen.

“We are seeing here the breakdown of the city function,” said San Francisco structural engineer Charles Scawthorne. “We did not see that in Northridge, Loma Prieta or even Mexico City in 1985.”

He said the engineers had seen thousands of people on the streets with little assistance, not knowing what to do, and with insufficient water, food and sanitary facilities. “Here we have such a breakdown. Lifelines are broken.”

Joanne M. Nigg, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, said her group had found a woeful lack of any attempt by authorities or rescue personnel to control residents’ movement in high-danger areas.

“People were allowed to return to teetering structures without any warning of the dangers in doing so, and additional casualties resulted,” she said. “There was neither any functional transportation nor any traffic control.

“The scope of the disaster was not known to the authorities early, and they had difficulty in prioritizing their response,” she said observers told her group.

“Kobe was not ready,” Nigg added. “There had been little education on what to do in an earthquake in advance, since none was expected, and, after the quake occurred, the news media, local television, radio and newspapers put too much emphasis on the casualties and gave little practical advice on what people should do.”

The groups reported that, while older wood dwellings fared worst, collapsing or tipping over by the thousands, even modern dwellings built to the latest standards collapsed in the worst-shaken areas in the heart of Kobe.

Damage to steel-frame buildings, such as that found in the Northridge earthquake, was even worse in the Kobe quake, the experts said, with many such structures noticeably tilting to one side. While these did not collapse, such buildings can no longer be occupied. Steel-reinforced bridge supports also crumbled, they said.

L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the California State Seismic Safety Commission, said the Kobe earthquake is pertinent to California because it fits state authorities’ scenarios for an urban quake either on the Newport-Inglewood fault in Los Angeles or the Hayward fault in the Bay Area.

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Just as in those scenarios, the rupture in the Kobe earthquake extended right into the heart of a city, with devastating consequences. Tobin noted that the Kobe event, like those scenarios, was what is known as a horizontal strike-slip quake with a surface rupture, or ground displacement, which released enormous amounts of energy where people live.

By contrast, the Northridge quake was on a vertical thrust fault that did not break the surface. “This is the model for the Hayward quake,” said Tobin. “Scientists here are shocked, but in a direct hit like this there will always be substantial damage, no matter how complete the preparations.”

Still, the engineers here said, much more could have been done in Kobe to mitigate damage.

Some participants said the Japanese had concentrated their efforts too much in and around Tokyo, the capital, 270 miles away, while neglecting other areas.

Paul Somerville, a Pasadena engineering seismologist, said at least one study suggests there have been quite a few strong earthquakes in the not-too-distant past within 100 miles of Kobe. He cited the Fukui quake of 1948, and said preparation and education of the Kobe population had been inadequate.

Somerville ascribed some of the worst Kobe damage to liquefaction, in which water-saturated landfill provides too weak a support for structures, turning to jelly in strong shaking. This is a problem in Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay area, where urban development has extended into areas that were formerly under water, he said.

Somerville noted that in Kobe he had been disturbed “to find some steel-frame buildings leaning a foot, but it’s too early to say what were the causes of their failure.”

Charles A. Kirchner of Mountain View, Calif., said that, in the most devastated area of downtown Kobe, “sometimes modern construction did well, and sometimes it did not. In the heaviest shaken areas, modern buildings too went down, and some top-heavy buildings completely tipped over.

“We became used to seeing pancaking of building stories on lower floors in Northridge,” he said. “But here we see pancaking often occurring on top floors, and we saw high-rises move. Where buildings were close together, they often tipped over into the streets, blocking them and impeding the ability to fight fires.”

The meeting here was under the auspices of the California-led Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, or EERI, and participants Thursday called on the world’s scientific community to undertake six months of urgent studies on urban-centered earthquakes.

Its leaders expressed nervousness that such strong criticism of the Japanese could impair cooperation and trust that had taken years to develop. But some of the strongest criticism came from Japanese participants.

Yujiro Ogava, disaster management planner at the United Nations’ Center for Regional Development in Nagoya, Japan, urged those assembled to pass a resolution admonishing the Japanese government that “urgent new earthquake safety steps are now required” throughout the country.

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Recommended studies would include a comprehensive survey in Japan, California and other vulnerable places of urban earthquake damage, a mapping of earthquake faults, review of the timeline of seismic events, assessment of repair costs in various scenarios and examinations of the “human travail” in urban earthquakes.

The EERI leadership resisted any direct call for Japanese government action.

“I would be very hesitant to make suggestions to the government of Japan,” said Christopher Arnold of Palo Alto, vice president of the EERI.

The EERI president-elect, Loring Wyllie of the San Francisco area, said that, while he was “sobered” by what he had seen in Kobe, the engineers’ inspections had provided only “a fragmentary look” in a “shotgun approach.”

“We have been working hard to build warmer relations with Japan,” Wyllie said later. “We don’t want to do anything to destroy that.”

But the group’s executive director, Susan K. Tubbesing, said, “These events are so terrible and so many lives are lost that we have an obligation to learn as much as we can, so we can save lives in the future.”