Kirk here. Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the 1953 floods that took the lives of over 500 people (198 of whom are still recorded as “missing”; their bodies were never recovered or identified). If you look at the RKK segment, you’ll see some clips that will give you an idea of what the people who experienced the flooding went through.
The following Wikipedia page provides lots of interesting details:
- 1,009 homes swept away in Kumamoto.
- Oguni got 500.2 millimeters of rain in one day (6/26).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Northern_Kyushu_flood
Though missing from the English page, the following Japanese page says that Yamaga got 528.0 millimeters of rain in one day (6/25).
https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/rkk/563335?display=1
Some things have improved since then. Civil engineering projects done on the Shirakawa should help protect Kumamoto City from flooding. On the other hand, I think that global warming has made extreme weather events more likely so I wouldn’t assume that something similarly catastrophic could never happen again.
