(Kurume, Japan) Torrential rains continued to hit central Japan on Wednesday and authorities at least feared 59 dead linked to floods and landslides since this weekend, mainly in the southwest of the country.
France Media Agency
Large areas of Kyushu, the large island in the southwest of the archipelago, had been submerged as early as Saturday morning by torrential rains that caused numerous fatal floods and landslides.
The bad weather is now moving further north. The Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) briefly placed the regions of Gifu and Nagano in the mountainous center of the country on high alert on Wednesday before lowering the alert level by a notch. JMA is still forecasting bad weather in a large part of the country until at least Friday.
PHOTO KYODO NEWS VIA AP
A JMA official warned of the risk of "unprecedented levels" of precipitation in places in the center. "Especially in areas at high risk for landslides and floods, the possibility that a disaster in one form or another is already underway is extremely high," he added.
More than 80 000 0 rescuers, including many members of the Japanese Self Defense Forces, have been deployed to devastated areas in recent days.
An official from the Kumamoto prefecture, the hardest hit, told AFP that 51 dead were counted, to which are added "four people on cardiopulmonary arrest", an expression used by the authorities before official confirmation of a death. Two other people died in Omuta, also on the island of Kyushu.
This assessment is likely to worsen because a dozen people remain missing. The authorities were also checking whether six other deaths had been linked to the weather.
"Total helplessness"
On the island of Kuyshu, where the rain had largely stopped on Wednesday, the inhabitants could only note the significant damage and mourn the victims.
PHOTO BY STR / JIJI PRESS / AFP
Keisuke Masuda, a resident of the small town of Hitoyoshi, in Kumamoto prefecture, told the Jiji news agency his horror when a wave from a flooded river swept away one of its neighbors.
"He was taken right in front of me," said the man from 063 years. "I was completely helpless."
His neighbor tried to hold on to a bush, before having to let go under the force of the current, by making desperate signs to his wife then that he disappeared into the raging river.
Naomi Nishimura, she lost her parents, who died in the floods in Hitoyoshi.
"They did not want to leave, even when a neighbor came to encourage them to evacuate [...], because I told them that I planned to come to their house "that day, she said in tears to the Japanese television channel NNN.
The evacuation recommendations were lifted on Wednesday for several hundred thousand inhabitants but close to 900 000 0 people remained concerned.
The coronavirus has complicated evacuations and reduced the capacity of shelters because of the distances to be observed between people. According to local media reports, some people preferred to sleep in their car rather than risk being contaminated in a shelter.
Japan was relatively spared from the pandemic, with 19 000 0 cases and less than a thousand deaths.
The country is in the middle of the annual rainy season, intensified according to experts with climate change. More of 200 people died in terrible floods in western Japan.