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The Rebuilding of Ruined
Places
The reconstruction of these ruins is a
further sign of the End Times. As we stated
in the previous section, during the twentieth
century, many cities were reduced to rubble
and thus had to be rebuilt, among them Berlin,
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Dresden.
In
1995, the earthquake that hit
Kobe reduced the city to heaps
of rubble. As the photographs
on the right show, the city
was soon reconstructed. |
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A similar example is the
Kobe, a Japanese city devastated by a powerful
earthquake in January 1995. For 30 years,
the Japanese government and universities
have invested 1 billion dollars in developing
early warning systems for earthquakes. However,
no model can distinguish all types of tremors.
The region of Kobe and Osaka is one of Japan's
most prominent industrial and commercial
centers. Thus, the total economic impact
of the Kobe earthquake was immense, amounting
to billions of dollars.9
Yet, despite this loss, Japan reconstructed
Kobe.
| 
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(Left) War devastated
Dresden in 1946.
(Right) Then Dresten was
rebuilt by 1996. |
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(Small picture above) Tokyo
was ruined by an 8.3 magnitude
earthquake in 1923 and flames
as an aftermath of intense shock
waves. As the photographs reveal,
Tokyo was soon rebuilt. |
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(Left)The
1906 earthquake in San Francisco
killed 3,000 people and burned
a great part of the city.
(Right) A view from of San Francisco
today. |
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9.
H. J. de Blij, M. H. Glantz, and S. L. Harris,
Restless Earth (The National Geographic
Society: 1997), 8.
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