It’s sunny out but new warnings have been issued. What you see is a Google Chrome translation of a web page that records e-mail warnings that are sent out in Japanese:
http://www.anshin.pref.kumamoto.jp/rireki/saigai/430000.html
This information seems to match up reasonably well with the information on the JMA site:
http://www.jma.go.jp/en/warn/349_table.html
By the way, this page is indexed here:
http://www.anshin.pref.kumamoto.jp/now.html
What follows is a bit of tangent but I’d like to write a little note about a similar kind of announcement that was sent out to to smartphones yesterday but was surprisingly unhelpful. Yesterday at a little after 1 PM, many of my students got a sudden warning message (I think it’s called a 緊急速報, “emergency alert”) on their phones that said to check the prefecture’s website, but did not give a URL. We looked at the top page of the website but could find anything that might explain the sudden warning. I’m not sure who is responsible for such messages. I looked on the web to try figure the system out or to find an archive of the messages that have been sent out but didn’t have much luck. At any rate, whoever is responsible, it was disappointing to see that people were being made to search for a needle in a haystack when one bureaucrat somewhere (again, I’m not sure who is responsible) could save everyone that trouble by simply adding a link! I didn’t get the notice on my phone but all of my students told me that they couldn’t find a link in the notice they got.
– Kirk
P.S. I can’t find it on the internet but I once saw a cartoon of a guy standing in front of a sign that says “IN CASE OF FIRE” (or was it “emergency”?) and reading an extremely long page of fine-print text as the flames of a fire are clearly approaching. The way officials put out emergency information on the internet here often reminds me of that cartoon.