TOKYO (Reuters) -Torrential rain over southwest Japan triggered landslides that killed at least one person, while four were missing, as authorities urged tens of thousands to leave their homes and troops were sent to help with rescue operations.
Japan is the latest country to be hit by unusually heavy rain in various parts of the world in recent days that has raised new fears of the pace of climate change.
“The rain is becoming so heavy unlike anything seen before,” Satoshi Sugimoto, director of forecast division at the Japan Meteorological Agency, told a press conference.
A woman in her 70s was killed when a landslide hit her house in the Fukuoka prefecture before dawn, public broadcaster NHK reported. Four people were missing and two were injured, government spokesperson Hirokazu Matsuno said later.
The defence ministry said members of the military were being sent to help with rescue work.
The highest-level heavy rain warning was issued in parts of the Fukuoka and Oita prefectures, on Kyushu, Japan’s third-largest island.
Eight rivers had burst their banks and dozens of slopes saturated from continuous rain since late last month had turned into mudslides, the land ministry said. The same region was hit by rain that killed dozens of people in July 2017.
Authorities urged tens of thousands of residents to move out of areas in danger of more landslides and flooding.
Some parts of Fukuoka had received more than 600 mm of rain since Friday, more than usually falls in the whole of July, media reported, and another 100 mm is expected up to early Tuesday, Sugimoto said.
A Toyota Motor Corp subsidiary Toyota Motor Kyushu said it would suspend night-shift operations on Monday at three factories in Fukuoka due to the rain, with operations due to resume on Tuesday morning.
Tire manufacturer Bridgestone Corp suspended operations at four factories in Fukuoka and Saga prefectures from Monday morning, a spokesperson said. It is unclear when operations would be resumed, the spokesperson added.
Meanwhile, the weather had not affected production lines of semiconductor firms Sony Group, Renesas Electronics Corp and SUMCO Corp, the companies told Reuters.
More than 200 post offices were closed, Japan Post said, while mobile carriers KDDI Corp and Nippon Telegraph and Telecom’s NTT Docomo reported unstable connections in some areas.
Matsuno said that 1,820 households were without power while 60 homes had no water, as of Monday late afternoon.
The Shinkansen bullet train service was briefly suspended operations between Hiroshima and Fukuoka’s Hakata stations while another 33 railway lines and 12 expressways were blocked and 35 flights were cancelled, the land ministry said.
The weather bureau said there was a 90% chance that the El Nino phenomenon, a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific, would continue into the autumn.
(Reporting by Daniel Leussink, Satoshi Sugiyama, Mariko Katsumura, Kaori Kaneko and Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Stephen Coates, Robert Birsel)
