Delays and lack of awareness magnify damage

MABI, Japan — When Isao Akutagawa moved to the sleepy riverside town of Mabi in western Japan 45 years ago, it seemed like the perfect suburb to raise his children.

Land was cheap and he could drive to his job in nearby Kurashiki City. As he built his home next to rice paddies 2 kilometers from the Odagawa river bank, he heard stories about a flood the year before, but didn’t pay much notice until local politicians began warning residents it could happen again.

“They told us years ago that the Odagawa river levees might break,” said Akutagawa, 79, as he mopped muddy water out of his living room. His home was submerged in a sudden flood earlier this month when heavy rain caused multiple levees to break.

Torrential rains across western Japan this month triggered floods and landslides that killed more than 200 people and left over a dozen missing in Japan’s worst weather disaster in 36 years.

Mabi, which merged with Kurashiki in 2005, was one of the hardest hit, accounting for most of the 51 killed in Kurashiki. More than a quarter of it was inundated, with floodwaters reaching as high as 4.8 meters in some neighborhoods.

If they had started earlier, even four or five years earlier, we wouldn’t have this.”

Isao Akutagawa,

Dwindling budget

More than a dozen residents, officials and experts express their opinions on how multiple failures increased Mabi’s death toll: flood-control plans were delayed for decades; residents often didn’t understand warnings about the risks; and an evacuation order for the worst-hit area came just minutes before confirmation that a levee had failed.

“We had our local politicians working for years to change the flow of that river,” Akutagawa said. A flood control project finally won approval in 2010 and construction was set to start this autumn.

“If they had started earlier, even four or five years earlier, we wouldn’t have this,” he added.

Kurashiki City officials said they had asked Japan’s land ministry to start work on the project every year since at least 2005. But it was not deemed a high enough priority.

However, officials in the city’s emergency management office said they did not blame the central government for the delay.

“The land ministry has to make their decision after seeing all the requests sent in from around the country. Every area, not just ours, make these requests hoping that our river gets picked,” said Hiroshi Kono, an emergency management officer at Kurashiki City. “Of course, it would have made us very happy if ours had been selected sooner.”

Competition for a dwindling budget was partly behind the delay, as was an environmental impact study, said Kairyu Takahashi, head of the prefectural legislature, and a member of a committee that discusses regional public works projects.

At a news conference on Friday, Keiichi Ishii, who heads the ministry of land, infrastructure and transport, which oversees flood prevention projects, declined to address whether the high death toll in Mabi was a preventable “human disaster” or who was responsible.

“We recognize that there’s a need to look into steps we can take to reduce the damage from disasters like this even a little bit,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a separate news conference last week.