At least six people have died and 10 others are missing after heavy rain triggered flooding and landslides along a peninsula in Japan that is still recovering from a deadly earthquake at the start of the year.
Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said on Monday that six people had been confirmed dead, while the Kyodo news agency said more than 100 communities had been cut off by blocked roads after almost two dozen rivers burst their banks.
Two of the deaths occurred near a landslide-hit tunnel in the city of Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture, which was undergoing repairs after being damaged in the New Year’s Day earthquake.
Elsewhere in Ishikawa, two people were missing after being swept away and eight others were unaccounted for, Kyodo added.
Rainfall in Wajima and the nearby city of Suzu reached twice the levels for September in an average year. Japan’s meteorological agency has downgraded its “special warnings” for the area to “warnings”, but advised residents to remain vigilant.
The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has instructed officials to monitor the damage and cooperate with local authorities as the region was still in the process of recovering from January’s earthquake when the rain, caused by an extratropical depression, arrived.
Heavy rain pounded Ishikawa from Saturday, with more than 540 millimetres (21 inches) recorded in the city of Wajima over 72 hours, the heaviest continuous rain since comparative data became available.
The region is still reeling from a magnitude-7.5 quake at the start of the year, which toppled buildings, triggered tsunami waves and sparked a major fire.
Flood waters inundated emergency housing built for those who had lost their homes in the New Year’s Day quake, which killed at least 374 people, according to Ishikawa government figures.
On Monday, 4,000 households were left without power after the rain, according to the Hokuriku Electric Power Company.
Akemi Yamashita, a 54-year-old Wajima resident, said she had been driving on Saturday when “within only 30 minutes or so, water gushed into the street and quickly rose to half the height of my car”.
“I was talking to other residents of Wajima yesterday, and they said, ‘it’s so heart-breaking to live in this city’. I got teary when I heard that,” she said, describing the earthquake and floods as “like something from a movie”.
In Wajima on Sunday, splintered branches and a huge uprooted tree piled up at a bridge over a river where the raging brown waters almost reached ground level.
Military personnel were sent to the Ishikawa region to join rescue workers over the weekend, as tens of thousands of residents were urged to evacuate.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.
The areas under the emergency warning saw “heavy rain of unprecedented levels”, JMA forecaster Satoshi Sugimoto said on Saturday, adding: “It is a situation in which you have to secure your safety immediately”.
With Agence France-Presse
