Kirk here with the weather and some COVID-19 news. The first colorful image is from the following page:
https://www.jma.go.jp/bosai/map.html#10/32.692/130.672/&elem=all&contents=warning&lang=en
It’s calm outside now but more rain is predicted for the coming days. NHK was saying that the conditions are right in many parts of Japan for extreme amounts of rain. They mentioned Kumamoto in this regard in their national broadcast. Evacuations have been called for in some parts of Amakusa and the elderly in many areas have been encouraged to evacuate.
If you’re new to this evacuation business, let me point out that a lot depends on your particular location. If you are in an area which is at elevated risk for landslides or in a flood plain, you should probably think seriously about moving to someplace safer. In my case, however, I live in an area that is higher than most of the land around us (we even have “yama” in our name), so I can’t imagine any amount of rain making us evacuate. So, study up on your particular area.
Also, please be aware that you can’t depend on me or other Kumamoto International editors for timely warnings. We do what we can but, since we’re doing this as volunteers, we can’t always just drop everything and send out warnings at the first sign of trouble.
Finally, Kumamoto set a new record for new COVID-19 cases today with 181. There’s a video about that (from which I took the second colorful screenshot) here:
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/f678b2b1c58e3e15d5d3c7695fc0d082d16bbda7