Heavy rains claimed their first victim in Japan yesterday, and others were missing as floods saw nearly 300,000 people being urged to leave the central Niigata region and tsunami-hit Fukushima.
River banks gave way to swollen rivers at several points and the meteorological agency warned that the rains could continue to be torrential, reaching 50mm per hour by midday.
SWOLLEN RIVERS
Photo: AFP
The agency urged the public to be on the maximum alert against more flooding and mudslides as television footage showed muddy swollen rivers, broken dykes and flooded houses.
Bridges over the Shinano River in Niigata disappeared into muddy water in the middle, while trees and telephone polls were seen fallen. Tens of cars were seen stranded on a road along the Shinano.
Local governments in Niigata and Fukushima prefectures have advised a total of 296,000 people to evacuate, according to public broadcaster NHK.
Helicopter footage on NHK showed that Kamo City in Niigata, 250km north of Tokyo, were extensively flooded, with water submerging roads and rice fields.
Eiichi Murayama, 67, was confirmed dead in Tokamachi City, Niigata, early yesterday.
DROWNING
“We found a car fallen in River Nakazawa last night ... and found the driver’s body downstream this morning,” a Niigata police official said of the drowned man.
Four other people are missing in the area, including a 93-year-old woman who was swept away in a river and a 25-year-old man who was believed to have fallen into a swollen river, police said.
Officials had requested the Japanese Self-Defense Force dispatch troops to join the search for missing people and help those stranded by mudslides and floods.
One man was listed as missing in Fukushima, whose Pacific coasts were hit by a massive tsunami on March 11 that crippled an atomic power plant in the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
More than 40 people who had spent a night in cars and buses after being stranded on a road blocked by mudslides and flooding in Fukushima were rescued unhurt.
“I couldn’t sleep. I had some food, but couldn’t swallow a bite” out of fear that fresh further mudslides would hit the stranded cars, a woman told NHK.
The weather agency has warned quake-hit regions are more prone to mudslides, as the tremors had worsened ground conditions.
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