Monster typhoon punched with winds up to 216 km/h
Jebi’s power was shown when an empty tanker was slammed into a bridge in Osaka
About 3000 passengers stranded by a typhoon at an offshore Japanese airport have begun returning by boat and by bus over a partially damaged bridge to the mainland.
Japanese broadcaster NHK showed aerial footage of the boat and a caravan of buses bringing people back from Kansai International Airport. The airport remains closed.
Typhoon Jebi swept northward across the mid-section of Japan’s main island yesterday, peeling roofs off buildings, toppling power poles and flooding the airport that serves Osaka, one of Japan’s largest cities.
Japanese media tallied at least nine deaths. More than one million households remained without power.
Jebi has been downgraded to a tropical storm and is heading north of Japan.
It caused considerable damage, as well as widespread travel chaos.
Jebi was briefly the strongest storm to hit Japan since 1993 with wind gusts of up to 216 km/h.
The storm made landfall on the southwestern island of Shikoku, and then again on the country’s main island of Honshu, near the city of Kobe.
NHK national television said the dead included one elderly man who fell from his apartment in the city of Osaka, the worst hit area, and another man buried under a collapsed warehouse in Shiga prefecture. The broadcaster said that the storm also left over 160 people with minor injuries, and cut power to around 1.6 million.
The swollen seas and high winds propelled a 2630-tonne empty tanker anchored in Osaka Bay into a bridge linking the mainland to Kansai International Airport, which was also partially flooded. Nobody was reported hurt in the incident that left thousands stranded in the terminal building.
Local media said around 700 flights were cancelled. Jebi also forced the suspension of services on many ferries and trains, including the high-speed bullet train between Tokyo and Hiroshima.
The storm dumped large amounts of rain through much of the country, with 100mm falling in Kyoto in an hour.
Most of the destruction, however, appears to have been wrought by the wind that was seen in videos ripping off part of the roof of Kyoto’s train station. Local TV news featured images of an empty ferris wheel in Osaka spinning furiously around.
Jebi comes as western Japan is still recovering from massive flooding and landslides that killed over 200 people and left thousands homeless in July.
The high death toll was widely blamed on the reluctance of locals to act on evacuation warnings. As Jebi approached, Japanese authorities issued evacuation warnings for over a million people.