TOKYO, Oct 13, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – At least 26 people were killed by powerful
Typhoon Hagibis, local media reported Sunday, a day after the ferocious storm
slammed into Japan, unleashing unprecedented rain and catastrophic flooding.
More than 100,000 rescuers, including 31,000 troops, were working into the
night to reach people trapped after torrential rain caused landslides and
filled rivers until they burst their banks.
The destruction forced the Rugby World Cup to cancel a third tournament
match, though a key Japan-Scotland fixture was ruled safe to play.
The storm moved off land on Sunday morning, and while it largely spared the
capital, it left a trail of destruction in surrounding regions.
The government put the death toll at 14, with 11 people missing, but local
media said at least 26 people had been killed, and at least 15 were still
unaccounted for.
Rivers overspilled their banks at nearly a dozen locations, including in
central Japan’s Nagano, where a levee breach sent water from the Chikuma
river gushing into residential neighbourhoods, flooding homes up to the
second floor.
Military and fire department helicopters winched survivors from roofs and
balconies in several locations. In Iwaki City, Fukushima, a rescue went
tragically awry when a woman died after falling while she was being winched
to safety.
Elsewhere, rescue workers carried out an hours-long boat operation to
evacuate hundreds of people from a retirement home in Kawagoe, northwest of
Tokyo, which was flooded up to its top floor.
One elderly woman wearing an orange life vest was brought out from a boat
on the back of a hard-hat wearing rescuer. Others were hoisted onto
wheelchairs and pushed along a muddy shore on arrival by boat.
Hagibis smashed into the main Japanese island of Honshu on Saturday night
as one of the most violent typhoons in recent years, with wind gusts of up to
216 kilometres per hour (134 miles per hour).
– ‘Please do your best’ –
The storm claimed its first victim even before making landfall, when high
winds flipped a vehicle, killing its driver.
Landslides and flooding claimed more lives overnight, and the toll climbed
higher after sunrise on Sunday, as the scale of the devastation wrought by
Hagibis became clear.
Bodies were retrieved from submerged homes and vehicles, from raging
overflowing rivers, and from buildings buried in landslides.
The dead included a municipal worker whose car was overcome by floodwaters
and two Chinese crew members aboard a boat that sank overnight in Tokyo Bay.
Four of the crew were rescued, but authorities were still searching for
another six.
“The government will do its utmost,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, vowing
that rescue efforts would run through the night.
“Please do your best,” he told a disaster management meeting.
More than 110,000 homes were still without power by Sunday evening, with
others experiencing water outages.
At the storm’s peak, more than seven million people were placed under non-
compulsory evacuation orders, and over 135,000 people were still in
government shelters by Sunday evening.
The storm prompted the Japan Meteorological Agency to issue its highest-
level rain disaster warning, saying “unprecedented” downpours were expected.
– ‘I don’t know where to start’ –
“The water came up higher than my head in the house,” Hajime Tokuda, a
finance professional living in Kawasaki near Tokyo told AFP.
He moved to his family’s home nearby, but that flooded too and they had to
be rescued by boat.
In Saitama’s Higashi Matsuyama city, northwest of Tokyo, rice and flower
farmers were counting their losses, with water submerging warehouses full of
freshly harvested produce.
“We never had a flood like this before in this neighbourhood,” said one
farmer, who declined to give his name.
“I don’t know where to start cleaning this mess.”
The storm brought travel chaos during a long holiday weekend in Japan,
grounding flights and halting local and bullet train services.
On Sunday, train services began resuming and operations also slowly
restarted at the two airports serving the capital, although many flights were
cancelled.
But some lines remained halted, with aerial footage in Nagano showing rows
of bullet trains partially submerged by flooding.
The storm also caused havoc for the sports world, delaying Japanese Grand
Prix qualifiers and forcing the cancellation of two Saturday Rugby World Cup
matches.
On Sunday morning, organisers cancelled a third fixture — Namibia-Canada –
– but gave the go-ahead to three others including a crunch Japan-Scotland
game in Yokohama, near Tokyo.
Scotland faced elimination if the match was cancelled and had threatened
legal action if it was not played.