Kirk with more about calls for the elderly to evacuate and general disaster information (more for future reference than for this specific typhoon).
Kumamoto City has a Disaster Prevention Information Portal. The website is in Japanese but it uses Google translate, which works pretty well:
https://city-kumamoto.secure.force.com
Today I’ve gotten interested in the call for the elderly and people with special needs to evacuate. The announcement from the city says that this applies to 731,464 people. That’s the entire population of Kumamoto City – not the number of people who are in the category to which a Level 3 announcement applies. Then, if you look at the number of people who have actually evacuated at this point (341 for the whole city), you can see that most people (even the elderly and people with special needs) didn’t think the announcement required their evacuation.
Now, as I posted earlier today, government guidlines indicate that people like me who are in areas where there is no danger of flooding have no real reason to evacuate, despite the “Level 3” announcement. So, in that sense, I think the low numbers may be just about right if only people who live in vulnerable areas and who have special needs (or poor health, etc) have evacuated. What bothers me, though, is how confusing the system is. The city didn’t include links of the sort I dug up today regarding exemptions with their calls for evacuation. So, how were people to decide whether or not the announcement applied to them?
I have difficulty understanding why government officials seem to have no qualms about making such confusing announcements. :(