With a death toll of at least 25 and the number of injured now above 175, Typhoon Hagibis is shaping up to be one of Japan's deadliest storms for this year.
Typhoon Hagibis followed on the heels of Typhoon Faxai, which hit the country only a month prior and caused 7 billion USD worth of damage and three fatalities.
Due to its massive size (almost ten times larger than Faxai), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) followed the storm in the days prior to landfall. Classified as a 'violent' typhoon, the most intense on the JMA's scale, Hagibis alarmingly picked up several degrees of intensity in just a few hours. Yasushi Kajihara, Director of the Forecast Division, expected that it would make landfall around the central or eastern parts of the country by Saturday.
In anticipation of the storm, several million people in the surrounding areas were urged to evacuate. Grocery stores were cleaned out of supplies as residents stocked up on provisions like food, water, and batteries. Transportation was disrupted as train services and flights in nearby areas were suspended.
At around 7:00 PM local time on Saturday, Hagibis made landfall on the Izu Peninsula, just south-west of Tokyo, and headed up the eastern coast.
With the high amount of rainfall, flooding and landslides had become a critical issue. Several rivers reached critical levels (some already overflowing), and ten levees collapsed due to the storm's intensity. Citizens were left stranded as floodwaters overwhelmed houses and buildings up to the second floor along the Chikuma, Oppe, and Tama rivers, while residences destroyed by landslides were reported in Kanagawa, Fukushima, and Gunma prefectures.
Violent winds believed to be a tornado were also reported in Ichihara, Chiba Prefecture, causing at least one fatality and injuring five others.
At its peak, around 430,000 households were left without access to power. Most affected were the Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures, but parts of the greater Tokyo area and surrounding prefectures also experienced outages as well. Several thousand households in Miyagi, Ibaraki, Gunma, Kanagawa, Nagano, Saitama, and Chiba prefectures also reported water supply interruptions.
Government agencies were quick to respond as over 27,000 self-defense forces personnel and rescue helicopters were deployed to assist police, fire department, and coast guard members engage in relief operations. As Hagibis became classified as a 'low-pressure system,' several heavy rain warnings were lifted in several prefectures, although authorities are still urging the public to stay alert as further damages may occur in the storm's aftermath.
Hagibis is drawing comparisons to Ida (1958), one of the worst typhoons in Japan's history. Making landfall over sixty years ago near the same region, Ida caused an estimated 50 million USD worth of damage and claimed the lives of 1269 residents. Since then, Japan has invested in extensive disaster risk reduction measures to ensure that figures won't reach this scale. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is currently setting up a taskforce to account for the full extent of Hagibis' damage.
Hagibis left the country by Sunday morning.
