The death toll in the worst typhoon to hit Japan for decades climbed to 66 on Tuesday, Oct. 15, as rescuers slogged through mud and debris in an increasingly grim search for the missing, and as thousands of homes remained without power or water.
Fifteen people remain missing nearly three days after Typhoon Hagibis smashed into central and eastern Japan, national broadcaster NHK said. More than 200 people were injured in the storm, whose name means “speed” in the Tagalog language.
Some 138,000 households were without water while 24,000 lacked electricity, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands without power just after the storm but cause for concern in northern areas where the weather was starting to turn chilly.
The highest toll was in Fukushima prefecture north of Tokyo, where levees burst in at least 14 places along the Abukuma River, which meanders through a number of cities in the agricultural prefecture.
At least 18 died in Fukushima, including a mother who was caught up in flood waters with her two children, one of whose death was confirmed on Monday while the other, a little boy, remained missing.
Thousands of police, fire officials and military personnel continued to search for people who may have been cut off by floodwaters and landslides set off by the storm, with hope diminishing that the missing would be found alive.
Survivors described how waters rose rapidly to chest height in roughly an hour and mainly at night, making it hard to escape to higher ground. Many of the dead in Fukushima were elderly, NHK said.
“I couldn’t believe it, the water came up so fast,” one man in Fukushima told NHK.
Though the threat of rain is expected to diminish on Tuesday, temperatures are likely to drop in many areas later this week, in some cases to unseasonably low temperatures, NHK said.
Typhoon Hagibis, which means “speed” in the Philippine language Tagalog, made landfall on Japan’s main island of Honshu on Saturday and headed out to sea early on Sunday.
A middle-aged man in Nagano, asked about the situation around his house, told NHK: “It’s just like a lake.”
Yoshinobu Tsuchiya, 69, returned on Monday morning to his home in Nagano City, near where the Chikuma Rover had breached its banks, to find that his first floor had been flooded and that the garden he tended had turned to brown mud.
“So this is what it’s come to,” Tsuchiya sighed to the Nikkei newspaper. “I can’t even imagine when we’ll finish cleaning up. I’m sick of this flood.”
A neighbor in his 60s told the newspaper, “This is just like a tsunami. This is hopeless.”
