Season for Natural Disasters

Just a couple of weeks ago the Kansai region of Japan was hit with a series of earthquakes that caused  quite a bit of damage and disruption.  And now a good part of Japan is facing yet another series of potential natural disasters.

While the end of June/beginning of July often sees a large amount of rain, we have seen much more that is typical in the past few days.  Due to an almost constant torrential rainfall for the past two days (and it's expected to continue into the weekend), we have had a lot of flood, landslide and inundation warnings.  Due to this combination of things, a lot of the trains have suspended service, and I also saw a very unusual event on my way home...the two main roads near my apartment were filled with traffic to the point of it being a traffic jam.  While those two roads see a lot of traffic, I have never, until today, seen anything even remotely close to a traffic jam before, so it was either a result of the train suspensions or people are seriously worried about these events.

As far as the flooding goes, the rivers have risen quite high and the flow is extremely strong.  In fact, there is a river on the way to work which often floods quite easily after heavy rainfall, but this time it looks intense.

Morning of July 5...seems like normal flooding (except happened much faster)

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Evening July 5...

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Morning July 6

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Evening July 6

Just for comparison...this is how the river normally looks...clearly a different season but usually you can walk down right next to it, and the water is extremely clear

The city of Kobe also posted some really interesting maps on their website regarding areas of potential flooding and landslides, and when I checked it last night on my way home from work, I was slightly concerned. There were a few potential landslide areas that were within 500m of my apartment building.  However, don't worry too much.  I wasn't included in the danger zone, and there are a number of buildings and roads between me and that area, so even if it were to happen, I should be alright.  It was slightly disconcerting to see that so close to me though.

The yellow areas are for landslide hazards, the red and green points are just evacuation sites

An overview of landslide risk...we're in the 'Extreme' zone for now...

Areas of potential flooding....

Don't be too worried though...nothing so bad has happened yet, and although the rain will likely continue throughout the weekend, I'm sure all will be fine here!

If you're feeling overly concerned, the city of Kobe website I was talking about before can be found here, but it isn't showing actual events, rather just a prediction of where possible events may occur.

Or for more recent events and forecasts, I would suggest taking a look at the Japan Meteorological Agency website, found here.