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870,000 urged to evacuate after torrential rain lashes southwestern and central Japan

17 Comments

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Evacuate and go where exactly?

8 ( +8 / -0 )

Very sad to see. Hope the people there can recover quickly. Been to Kumamoto, really nice place and very kind people.

6 ( +7 / -1 )

Same as what hamburger and zichi said, where would you possibly expect that many people to bug out to? If evacuation centers of neighboring prefectures that aren't hit by strong rains and flooding are available, why not encourage them to drive up there? This may sound like an understatement but the climate has been really unfriendly lately. There's also flooding in China and in my home country's southern islands.

5 ( +5 / -0 )

Maybe El Niño is causing all these torrential rains.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

I question why the infrastructure in Kyushu is not more robust.

Flooding repeats again and again in Kyushu.

Kanto cities have huge drains to allow water to escape urban areas.

Kansai’s cities are protected by high tides by massive concrete walls.

The central government has failed and is failing Kyushu...

5 ( +11 / -6 )

Flooding repeats again and again in Kyushu.

I often wonder what the city planners' thought processes are when approving applications to build (beside rivers and mountains)...

4 ( +6 / -2 )

@meiyou

it is caused by global warming heating the oceans up higher than normal so the the normal el-Nino becomes not normal causing radical weather patterns.

expect super typhoons and hurricanes this season.

-1 ( +4 / -5 )

Should've urged before all the flooding and deaths...

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Yeah, great, and go WHERE?

We in Florida are faced with the same delima whenever it's the rainy / typhoon / hurricane season...nowhere to go.

At least we don't build houses on obvious Flood Plain...it's ILLEGAL here.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

I am staying at a city in Tohoku for my mother who is at a nursing home. The home is located about 100 meters from a river running through the city. There is a river bank which is not very high. In the wake of floods and landslides happened in Kyushu, I became a little worried about the location of the home. I contacted a city hall and they said the home is located at a place included in "hazard map." The home was built about five years ago while hazard map was first instated several decades ago. I asked the city official, why the home was built despite the area was designated as a dangerous place in the hazard map? He said the "hazard map" is to awaken the cautiousness of people living in the area but the city does not have power to prohibit building houses there.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

I took a Geography of Japan course at university almost 20 years ago, but I can vividly remember my prof talking about how Japan's levees were doomed to fail because of the buildup of sediment over time and the absence of seasonal floods. Basically, the rivers are getting higher and higher every year in many parts of Japan because the sediment is not being spread out over a wider area. Even in the last ten years, I've noticed the Tonegawa running higher on average.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Yikes vanity you're not in a safe place. Don't know how a city can have no power then it's not a city. Next up will be insurance paid but not available because it was in the hazard zone. Consider your cautiousness awakened

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Welcome to global warming, humanity's greed is the cause of all this.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Global Warming....lol. Yeah, that’s what did this

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

What a mess! this is going to take some time to clear up, and the cost to industry, the landscape, small business's, the local economy, and this is on top on the C19 virus lock down. And I suppose the insurance companies will wriggle out of paying if they can.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

@AgentX

I often wonder what the city planners' thought processes are when approving applications to build (beside rivers and mountains)...

Obviously you have a very vague idea about Japan's topography. The reason why they build beside rivers and mountains is very simple: lack of other space (land). Seventy percent of territory of Japan are mountains. While in Tohoku or Hokkaido there are quite a lot of flat land, to the south of Tokyo such land is premium. They build whereever they can squeeze in.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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