Heavy flooding
causes deaths, injuries In Miyagi Prefecture, one woman was found dead in her floating car, and in Tochigi Prefecture, to the north of the capital Tokyo, two deaths were reported, one in a landslide and another who had drowned.
Officials of Ibaraki Prefecture say all 15 Joso City
residents who couldn't be contacted after last week's floods were found
unharmed on Tuesday.
Flash map of rivers and flood warnings (Japanese): http://www.ktr.mlit.go.jp/shimodate/simulation/flash/fldcharts.html
Watch the recovery process in these drone movies:
11 September
11 September
The Meteorological Agency issued a tokubetsu keiho for heavy rain, the highest-level special warning, for all of Tochigi Prefecture, at 12:20 a.m. on Thursday and for the whole of Ibaraki Prefecture at 7:45 a.m. the same day. The banks of the Kinugawa River in Ibaraki broke at 12:50 p.m.
In addition, the Joso Municipal Government issued an evacuation order to residents along the Kinugawa River at 2:20 a.m., more than five hours before the agency’s special warning.
Kei Yoshimura, an associate professor of hydrology at the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, said that, given all the warnings, everyone along the river should have evacuated to safer ground long before the banks collapsed.
“One probable reason some people didn’t evacuate early is that rain had subsided in the area at around noon, when the banks collapsed,” Yoshimura said. “But flooding always occurs (several hours to days) after heavy rainfall. It’s also impossible to predict where exactly the banks will break.”
Meanwhile, the land ministry’s flood simulation data (jtim.es/S4Ggn) and the city’s hazard map were little known to the public, he said, urging prefectural authorities to assist resource-poor municipal governments with evacuations.
Shibata says he found himself completely engulfed by the
deluge and had to fight hard to keep his head above the surging waters. He
narrowly escaped death by taking refuge on the roof of a nearby house, but in
the process a fragment of broken glass sliced open his wrist, leaving a wound
that required five stitches. None of this, however, would have happened had the
city of Joso warned of the approaching danger over a loudspeaker in languages
other than Japanese, the Sao Paulo native says. “Japanese people had plenty of
time to escape, it seemed, but my friends and I didn’t because we didn’t
understand the warning. Even if we wanted to call for help, we didn’t know what
to say. I really thought we were going to die,” he said. Shibata is one of more
than 4,000 foreign residents in Joso who are grappling with the language
barrier and a lack of information in the aftermath of the typhoon-driven
flooding that inundated a third of the city and has driven thousands from their
homes. “Okay, things got broken. That’s rough. But there is nothing we can do
about that. It just means we need to work harder to get new ones,” Shibata
said. “But what hurts me more is how the city didn’t, and still doesn’t, take
us seriously. We pay taxes just as Japanese people do. That’s unacceptable.”
Joso has one of the highest concentrations of foreign
residents among cities in Ibaraki Prefecture. As of the end of last year, a
total of 4,263 people, or more than 6 percent of the city’s population, was
non-Japanese, according to Ibaraki Prefecture. Of that, 2,041 were Brazilians,
followed by 934 Filipinos, 287 Chinese and 245 Peruvians.
“The city knows there are many Brazilians living in this
area and that many of us don’t understand the language well. How could they not
have the decency of pre-recording emergency warnings in Portuguese to let us
know where to evacuate?” said Sakaue, who himself spoke fluent Japanese.
Another Japanese-Brazilian resident, 22-year-old Guilherme
Dacosta Takahashi, said emergency alerts emailed by the city were all written
in Japanese, peppered with complex kanji characters that made little sense to
the majority of his compatriots. “It would’ve been better if they had
translated the alerts to different languages or written them in
easier-to-understand Japanese for us,” Takahashi said.
On its website, the city offers information in English and
Portuguese on how to react in the event of a flood. It includes a list of
locations people should evacuate to and offers a phone number they can call to
receive updates.
51-year-old Japanese-Brazilian Jorge Fujise, said a
semblance of normalcy was beginning to take hold as basic utilities such as
electricity and water had slowly been activated. His biggest concern for now,
Fujise said, was the possible spread of infectious diseases among children. “Many
foreign residents are not used to life in evacuation centers, so as soon as the
water subsided, they headed back to their homes — even though they are not
necessarily aware of possible risks of infection,” he said. “So you see many
children playing around in a pool of dirty water, for example,” he said, noting
little information comes from the city in foreign languages on how residents
can sterilize buildings and avoid diseases.
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