Kirk with a follow-up about “evacuation orders.”
This Japan Times article includes the following sentence:
“In the city of Kumamoto, 368,000 residents were ordered to evacuate on the morning of July 3, after water levels rose in the Shirakawa river, which runs through the area.”
The population of Kumamoto City that is published in the June edition of the Shisei dayori (市政だより) is 736,245 so 368,000 is about half of the whole city. Obviously, it would have been an absolute disaster (a “secondary disaster”) if all of those people had tried to evacuate. So, it’s NOT the case that “368,000 residents were ordered” to evacuate. Rather, that many people live in areas where they were to evacuate if their particular circumstances (proximity to a river or steep incline, etc.) warranted it. So, as I have written in the past “evacuation order” doesn’t mean “everyone go to your nearest evacuation center.”
See this previous post of mine for more details:
I think that, in preparation for future disasters, the Japan Times and other English-language newspapers should explain this properly.
Now, one might imagine that half of the city’s population was ordered to evacuate but not everyone obeyed. That, however, wasn’t the assumption of the Hindustan Times. They published an article with the following headline:
Heavy rains trigger havoc in Japan’s Kumamoto, over 360,000 evacuated https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/japan-rains-heavy-rains-trigger-havoc-in-japans-kumamoto-over-360-000-evacuated-101688383115802.html
There really WOULD have been havoc if over 360,000 had actually evacuated.
Now, of course, I recognize that few foreigners in Japan rely on the Hindustan Times for information about disasters here but, nonetheless, I think it’s an interesting example of how the multilingual telephone game of “confusing government proclamation –> media report –> media report based on a media report” can go off the rails, so to speak.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/03/national/kyshu-floods-rain-evacuation/
