By Tim Kelly and Irene Wang
FUKUOKA/YUFU, Japan (Reuters) – Typhoon Shanshan drenched large swathes of Japan with torrential rain on Friday, prompting authorities to issue flood and landslide warnings hundreds of miles from the storm’s center, halt travel services and shut down production at major factories.
At least four people have been killed and 99 others injured in storm-related incidents in recent days, according to the disaster agency.
In the southwestern Kyushu region, where the storm that authorities say could be one of the strongest ever to hit the region made landfall on Thursday, residents were surveying the damage after a night of heavy rain and strong winds.
Yu Fukuda, 67, who runs a fish farm and an adjacent restaurant in the tourist city of Yufu in Oita Prefecture, said she arrived Friday morning to find floodwaters one meter high had submerged the building.
“There were lines on the windows and everywhere were marks of mud and dirt, so I could tell how high the water was. I felt very sad,” she told Reuters as her staff and relatives removed debris from fishing nets and dead fish.
“I was hoping the hurricane would pass quickly, but it’s been here for a long time,” she added.
The typhoon, which brought winds of up to 50 meters per second (180 kilometers per hour/112 miles per hour), strong enough to topple moving trucks, was near the coastal city of Matsuyama in Ehime prefecture at 3:45 p.m. (2345 GMT) and was moving east, authorities said.
Kyushu Electric Power Co. said about 250,000 homes in seven prefectures in Kyushu were without power on Thursday, but many had service restored on Friday.
Warm, moist air flowing around the hurricane has dumped record levels of rain in some areas far from the main storm, which authorities say is a concern given its slower-than-expected movement across the country.
Evacuation notices were issued for more than 3.3 million people across the country, most of them in the hard-hit Kyushu region and central and eastern areas including the capital Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. Authorities there warned of possible landslides and river flooding due to the heavy rain.
Shizuoka, a major city in central Japan, has seen more than 500 mm of rain in the past 72 hours, the highest level since the Meteorological Agency began collecting data in 1976.
But as of Thursday, only about 30,000 people had been evacuated, most of them in Kyushu, Disaster Management Minister Yoshifumi Matsumura said.
The storm is expected to approach central and eastern areas, including Tokyo, over the weekend and into early next week, the Meteorological Agency said.
Toyota Nissan (NYSE:) suspended operations at all of its domestic plants through Monday morning due to the storm. Other automakers Nissan (OTC:) and Honda (NYSE:), semiconductor companies Renesas and Tokyo Electron, and electronics giant Sony The company (NYSE:) also temporarily halted production at some factories.
Airlines including ANA Holdings and Japan Airlines have announced the cancellation of hundreds of domestic flights and some international flights. Several ferry and rail services, including the bullet train between Tokyo and the central city of Nagoya, were also suspended on Friday morning.
Lin Yu-hua, a 60-year-old tourist from Taiwan, had her flight home from Fukuoka cancelled on Thursday. She was asked to book another flight but had difficulty getting to the airport on Friday morning.
“We were very worried and upset because we didn’t know what to do,” she told Reuters at a near-deserted train station on Friday morning after discovering all rail services, including the metro to the airport, had been cancelled.
“We stayed in Japan for another day. Then we saw on the news that our plane from Taiwan couldn’t land in Japan after flying around the area for about 40 minutes, and returned to Taiwan. We were busy trying to find our way back home,” she said.
Typhoon Shanshan is the latest severe weather system to hit Japan, following Typhoon Ampil, which also caused power outages and evacuations, earlier this month.
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