Flooded bullet trains show risks from disasters
TOKYO — The typhoon that ravaged Japan last week hit with unusual speed and ferocity, leaving homes buried in mud and people stranded on rooftops.
But nothing spoke more of the powerlessness of modernization against natural disasters than rows of bullet trains deluged in floodwaters in Nagano, a mountainous region to the northwest of Tokyo.
Japan’s technological prowess and meticulous attention to detail are sometimes no match for rising risks in a precarious era of climate change.
Experts say they also instill a false sense of security in a country inured to danger by the constant threat of calamitous earthquakes, tsunami and volcanoes.
“Weather conditions in Japan up to now have been relatively moderate,” said Toshitaka Katada, a disaster expert and professor at the University of Tokyo.
Those days are over, and Japan’s readiness for disasters, still based on data collected decades ago, hasn’t kept up with the times, he said.
“Damage gets multiplied when people are overly confident about their safety,” Katada said.
With increasingly extreme weather, the government, businesses and individuals need to rethink their preparedness.
Rescue efforts continued Tuesday, three days after Typhoon Hagibis made landfall near Tokyo and then swerved northward before moving over the Pacific as a tropical storm. The casualty counts were climbing, with dozens dead, more missing and some 100 people injured in Nagano, Fukushima, Miyagi and other central and northern prefectures.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a parliamentary session that the number of deaths had climbed to 53 and was expected to rise, as at least nine other people are presumed dead. Japan’s Kyodo News agency, citing its own tally, put the death toll at 69.
At least 10 Shinkansen trains, each consisting of 12 cars, were damaged by the flooding at a depot in Nagano, said East Japan Railway Co. spokesman Yuji Ishikawa.
Evacuation orders were still in effect, so details were still unclear. But electronic equipment underneath the carriages was likely totally wrecked, he said.
The scientific community has been warning about the trend toward more extreme weather for years, including intensifying cyclones.
Many of the casualties from natural disasters, especially landslides and flooding, reflect the vulnerability of Japanese communities, businesses and public infrastructure to torrential rains and other conditions that were not considered when homes and other facilities were built.
Despite increasingly accurate forecasts, it’s still difficult to predict the exact track of storms and the potential damage they may bring, said Chris Field, director at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
“The message for typhoonprone areas is that all should prepare for a future of stronger storms,” Field said.
“It is important to understand and respond to the evidence that storms are getting stronger as a result of climate change and that investments in disaster prevention need to rise, now more than ever,” he said.
Japan already is in crisis over its aging and inadequately maintained infrastructure.