By Tim Kelly and Irene Wang
FUKUOKA/YUFU, Japan (Reuters) – Typhoon Shanshan drenched large parts of Japan with heavy rain on Friday, prompting warnings of flooding and landslides hundreds of kilometers from the storm’s center, halting travel services and snarling manufacturing factories were shut down.
At least four people have been killed and 99 injured in storm-related incidents in recent days, according to the disaster management agency.
In the southwestern region of Kyushu, where authorities say the storm could be one of the strongest ever to hit the region, it made landfall on Thursday, residents surveying the damage after a night of heavy rain and high winds .
Yu Fukuda, 67, who runs a fish farm and an adjacent restaurant in the seaside town of Yufu in Oita Prefecture, said she arrived Friday morning to find that floodwaters three feet high had inundated the building.
“There were streaks on the windows and traces of mud and dirt everywhere, so I could see how high the water had risen. I felt very sad,” she told Reuters as her staff and relatives cleared away the debris of fishing nets and dead animals. fish.
“I wish the typhoon had just passed quickly, but it lingered here for a long time,” she said.
Packing winds of up to 50 meters per second (180 km per hour/112 mph), strong enough to blow over moving trucks, the typhoon was near the coastal city of Matsuyama in Ehime prefecture at 3:45 p.m. (2345 GMT). east, according to authorities.
According to Kyushu Electric Power Co. About 250,000 households in seven prefectures in Kyushu were without power on Thursday, but many had seen services restored on Friday.
The warm and moist air surrounding the typhoon brought record-breaking amounts of rain to some areas far from the main storm, which authorities said is worrying given its slower-than-expected movement across the country.
Notices advising residents to evacuate have been issued to more than 3.3 million people across the country, especially in the hard-hit Kyushu area and the central and eastern regions, including the capital Tokyo and nearby Yokohama. Authorities there warned of possible landslides and rivers overflowing their banks as a result of the heavy rain.
Shizuoka, a major city in central Japan, has seen more than 500 millimeters of rain in the past 72 hours, the highest volume since the weather bureau began collecting the data in 1976.
But only about 30,000 people had been evacuated as of Thursday, mainly in Kyushu, Disaster Management Minister Yoshifumi Matsumura said.
The storm is expected to approach the central and eastern regions, including Tokyo, this weekend and early next week, the weather bureau said.
Toyota (NYSE:) has suspended operations at all of its domestic factories through Monday morning due to the storm. Other car manufacturers Nissan (OTC:) and Honda (NYSE:), semiconductor companies Renesas and Tokyo Electron, and electronics giant Sony (NYSE:) have also temporarily halted production at some factories.
Airlines including ANA Holdings and Japan Airlines have announced cancellations of hundreds of domestic and some international flights. Many ferry and rail services, including the bullet train between Tokyo and the central city of Nagoya, were suspended on Friday morning.
Lin Yue-Hua, a 60-year-old tourist from Taiwan, had her flight home from Fukuoka canceled on Thursday. She was told to book another flight, but had trouble 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 an almost deserted train station on Friday morning after learning that all train services, including the metro to the airport, had been cancelled.
“We stayed in Japan for another day. Then we saw in the news that after flying around Japan for about 40 minutes, our flight from Taiwan could not land in Japan and flew back to Taiwan. We have been busy finding our way home she said.
Typhoon Shanshan is the latest severe weather system to hit Japan, following Typhoon Ampil, which also led to power outages and evacuations earlier this month.
