When Isao Akutagawa moved to the sleepy riverside community of Mabicho in Okayama Prefecture 45 years ago, it seemed like the perfect suburb to raise his c
KURASHIKI, OKAYAMA PREF. – When Isao Akutagawa moved to the sleepy riverside community of Mabicho in Okayama Prefecture 45 years ago, it seemed like the perfect suburb to raise his children.
In the town, which was merged with the nearby city of Kurashiki in 2005 and is now called the Mabicho district, land was cheap and he could drive to his job in Kurashiki.
As he built his home next to rice paddies 2 km from the Oda River bank, he heard stories about a flood the year before, but didn’t pay much notice until local politicians began warning residents it could happen again.
“They told us years ago that the Oda River levees might break,” said Akutagawa, 79, as he mopped muddy water out of his living room. His home was submerged in a sudden flood earlier this month when heavy rain caused multiple levees to break.
Torrential rains across western Japan this month triggered floods and landslides that killed more than 200 people and left over a dozen missing in Japan’s worst weather disaster in 36 years.
Mabicho was one of the hardest hit, accounting for most of the 51 killed in Kurashiki. More than a quarter of it was inundated, with floodwaters reaching as high as 4.8 meters in some neighborhoods.
Interviews with more than a dozen residents, officials and experts show how multiple failures increased Mabicho’s death toll: Flood-control plans were delayed for decades; residents often didn’t understand warnings about the risks; and an evacuation order for the worst-hit area came just minutes before confirmation that a levee had failed.
“We had our local politicians working for years to change the flow of that river,” Akutagawa said. A flood control project finally won approval in 2010 and construction was set to start this autumn.
“If they had started earlier, even four or five years earlier, we wouldn’t have this,” he added.
Kurashiki officials said they had asked the land ministry to start work on the project every year since at least 2005. But it was not deemed a high enough priority.
However, officials in the city’s emergency management office said they did not blame the central government for the delay.
“The land ministry has to make their decision after seeing all the requests sent in from around the country. Every area, not just ours, make these requests hoping that our river gets picked,” said Hiroshi Kono, an emergency management officer at Kurashiki. “Of course, it would have made us very happy if ours had been selected sooner.”
Hiroshi Yamauchi, an official at the land ministry’s Chugoku Regional Development Bureau in Hiroshima, said his agency had “followed proper procedures,” but that it was common for large-scale river projects to take years to complete.
