A powerful typhoon lashed Japan Monday, leaving one dead and dumping
torrential rains, damaging homes and flooding parts of the country’s
popular tourist destination of Kyoto, where 260,000 people in city
centre were ordered to evacuate to shelters.
Typhoon Man-yi,
packing wind speeds of 162 kilometres per hour Monday afternoon, was
centred over the city of Sendai, about 350 kilometres north of Tokyo.
More Related to this Story
Dozens were injured. Police and disaster management officials said a
72-year-old woman was found dead Monday after her body was dug out of
the debris of her home smashed by a mudslide the night before in Shiga
prefecture, east of Kyoto. Public broadcaster NHK said three others were
missing.
NHK showed tourists in Kyoto being taken to safety on boats on a flooded riverside street, towed by rescue workers.
In
the nearby town of Fukuchiyama, an aerial view showed a vast area of
muddy water swallowing the town, with houses, fields or other structures
half-submerged under water. The town’s entire population of 81,246 was
ordered to evacuate.
The government set up an emergency task force
to assess damage and support rescue effort, said Prime Minister’s
Office official Hikariko Ono. Kyoto and neighbouring Shiga prefecture
asked the Defence Ministry to mobilize relief teams.
About 70
people were injured across the country since Sunday, NHK said, citing
its own tally. Among the missing was a 77-year-old woman who disappeared
since a mudslide hit her house in nearby Fukui prefecture. A man was
missing after he went to check fish traps in a river in Fukushima
prefecture.
More than 300 homes were flooded across western and
central Japan, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency.
About 80,000 houses were without electricity in western and central
Japan.
Trains in Tokyo and its vicinity were largely suspended and hundreds of flights were grounded.
As
a preventative step, workers at the crippled Fukushima Da-ichi nuclear
power plant, about 250 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, were pumping
accumulating rain water pooling around hundreds of storage tanks
containing radioactive water to the ocean. That was to avoid the risk of
potential tank leaks getting mixed with rainwater seeping into the soil
or flowing into the sea.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.
said the plant released what is believed to be untainted rainwater to
the Pacific in order to avoid flooding near the tanks, a step that could
violate safety rules, the Nuclear Regulation Authority said. TEPCO says
the radioactivity in the released water was within allowed discharge
limits, but duty regulators at the plant are checking.
Recent
acknowledgment by officials that contaminated water is leaking from
underground and storage tanks into the ocean have triggered concerns
about the plant’s safety.
The Meteorological Agency said the storm
dumped an “unprecedented amount of rainfall” in Kyoto and two of its
neighbouring prefectures it passed overnight, dumping as much as 8
centimetres per hour. It lifted a “special warning” for the area earlier
Monday but urged residents to stay alert.
In Kyoto, where the
city’s major Katsura River flooded, about 260,000 people in the
prefectural capital alone were told to evacuate. Hundreds of thousands
of others were also ordered to evacuate across Japan.
No comments:
Post a Comment