Japan braced for its strongest typhoon of the year on Wednesday, with authorities issuing the highest alert level for winds and storm surges on the main southern island of Kyushu.
“The typhoon Shanshan “It is expected to approach southern Kyushu with extremely strong force by Thursday and could make landfall,” government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi said.
“We are expecting strong winds, high waves and storm surges on a scale many people have never experienced,” he added.
Evacuations and already two missing
Faced with this situation, the authorities have triggered their highest “special alert” for strong winds, heavy rains and flood waves, calling on more than 56,000 people to evacuate.
The approach of the typhoon, with gusts of up to 252 km/h and already accompanied by heavy rains, has prompted the automobile giant Toyota to suspend production at its factories across the country.
All 28 production lines at Toyota’s 14 Japanese factories and those of its subsidiaries will shut down from Wednesday afternoon until Thursday, a spokesman for the automaker told AFP.
Separately, two people remained missing Wednesday after a landslide buried a house with five members of a family in Gamagori, a small city in the center of the country on the Pacific coast.
Two people were rescued and “a woman in her 70s was found unconscious and taken to hospital at around 2:25 p.m. (05:25 GMT),” a Gamagori municipal official told AFP, while rescue workers are still searching for two men, a man in his 70s and a man in his 30s.
1100 mm of rain expected in 48 hours
Late Wednesday afternoon, images from NHK television showed roofs blown off, windows broken and trees uprooted.
“The roof of our carport was completely blown away. I wasn’t home when it happened, but my children say they felt a shaking so strong they thought it was an earthquake,” a Miyazaki resident told NHK.
Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) chief forecaster Satoshi Sugimoto warned of “extremely high risk of major disasters.”
Two prefectures in southern Kyushu are expected to receive nearly half of their annual rainfall in 48 hours. In Kagoshima and Miyazaki, 500 mm of rain in the 24 hours through Thursday morning are expected, followed by another 600 mm in the 24 hours through Friday morning, according to the JMA.
Japan Airlines cancelled 172 domestic flights and six international flights on Wednesday and Thursday. Rival ANA said it cancelled 219 domestic flights and four international flights between Wednesday and Friday.
Railway companies operating the high-speed Shinkansen lines have already announced that trains could also be cancelled depending on weather conditions this week.
The typhoon is expected to track across Japan from west to east throughout the rest of the week.
Typhoons in the region are forming closer to shore than before, intensifying more quickly and staying over land longer because of climate change, according to a study published last July.
From August 15 to 17, another typhoon, Ampilcaused the cancellation of many trains and flights in Japan, but caused only minor injuries and damage as it made its way up the Pacific coast off the Tokyo area.