A rapidly weakening Typhoon Lan yesterday made landfall in Japan, setting off landslides and flooding that prompted evacuation orders for tens of thousands of people, but then headed out to sea after largely sparing the capital, Tokyo.
Five people were reported killed, hundreds of flights canceled and train services disrupted in the wake of Lan, which had maintained intense strength until virtually the time it made landfall west of Tokyo in the early hours of yesterday.
At least five people were killed, one a man in his 60s who was passing a building site when scaffolding collapsed on him. In western Japan, a 70-year-old man was found dead in Yamaguchi after he dived into the sea to grab a rope from another vessel as he attempted to escape from his troubled boat, a coast guard said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In Osaka prefecture, a man in his 80s died after being crushed under a blown-off shutter, while a woman in her 60s was found dead in a submerged car, local officials said.
A 29-year-old man was also found in a submerged car in the central prefecture of Mie.
Two others were left comatose by injuries and one man was missing, NHK public television said.
Nearly 90 others suffered minor injuries.
Rivers burst their banks in several parts of the nation and fishing boats were tossed up on land. A container ship was stranded after being swept onto a harbor wall, but all 19 crew members escaped injury.
About 80,000 people in Koriyama, a city 200km north of Tokyo, were evacuated as a river neared the top of its banks, NHK said, and several hundred houses in western Japan were flooded.
“My grandchild lives over there. The house is fine, but the area is flooded and they can’t get out,” one man told NHK.
Lan had weakened to a category 2 storm when it made landfall, sideswiping Tokyo after powering north for days as an intense category 4 storm, according to the Tropical Storm Risk monitoring site.
Lan is the Marshall Islands word for “storm.”
The center of the storm was out in the Pacific northeast of Tokyo yesterday afternoon and it was moving northeast at 75kph, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
It is expected to become a tropical depression today.
About 350 flights were canceled and train services disrupted over a wide area of Japan, although most commuter trains were running smoothly in Tokyo.
Toyota Motor Corp canceled the first shift at all of its assembly plants, but said it would operate the second shift as normal.
Additional reporting by AFP
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