Heavy rain causes deadly flooding near Tokyo and strands travellers
At least five people have been killed, with one other missing.
Record-breaking rainfall has flooded cities east of Tokyo overnight, killing at least five people, injuring more than two dozen others and stranding thousands, authorities in Japan said.
As the deluge subsided, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) downgraded its most severe heavy-rain warning in more than a dozen municipalities in the prefecture of Chiba while forecasting more rain later on Friday.
The prefecture saw unprecedented rainfall levels on Thursday, with 4.5in in just one hour in Chiba City and 3.8in in one hour in the city of Sakura, the JMA said.
Photos and television footage showed widespread damage, with homes, cars and parts of railway tracks filled with muddy water.
Roads and dozens of homes were also flooded and some areas remained without power.
Chiba prefecture officials said the five deaths included a man found floating on a flooded road in Ichikawa city and a woman who had been stuck in a flooded car in Sakura.
Two others were presumed dead after being pulled from flooded cars in the cities of Kashiwa and Chiba.
One person remained missing, and more than 30 people were injured, including five seriously, officials said.
Meanwhile, the Ground Self-Defence Force said it dispatched buses to pick up about 4,000 stranded people who stayed overnight at the Soga train station, a local route that also serves Tokyo Disney, which did not report any damage.
The operation ended later on Friday.
Hundreds of others sheltered overnight at the Chiba prefectural government building.
On Friday, thousands of people stuck overnight at the Narita airport serving the Tokyo region gradually left as train service partially resumed on Friday morning with delays.
Flights in and out of Narita were operating normally, with many people returning home at the end of Japan’s Bon Buddhist holiday week.
Some 170 homes were flooded in the prefecture and more than 300 people took shelter at public facilities as of Friday afternoon, Chiba officials said.
In the city of Togane in central Chiba, a landslide blocked a road.
The number of homes that had lost power because of the torrential rain and flooding fell to 18,000 on Friday, down from 68,000 the day before, according to the Tepco Power Grid.
Massive rainfall is believed to have exceeded the designed sewer capacity in Chiba’s urban areas, where large areas are covered with asphalt or concrete, potentially adding to the overflow of excess rainwater and causing extensive flooding, Koji Ikeuchi, a University of Tokyo civil engineering professor, told the Nikkei business daily.