Flood
Besides tsunami, typhoon is also one of the Japanese languages that can be seen in English dictionaries. A tropical low pressure appearing in the South Pacific Ocean is generally called “typhoon”. Similarly, the tropical storm appearing in the Indian Ocean is called “cyclone”, and the one that breaks out in the Atlantic Ocean is named” hurricane”. It doesn’t need further explanations about calling any more here. If you go back to your school day, I'm sure that you learned it in geographical classes.
As you see different names in low pressures, huge storms like typhoon appear somewhere in the world. Hurricanes give us rather destructive images because of the size and power. Especially in the US, the horrible storms have done immeasurable damages to the people. But Japan has also been plagued by the tropical storms for many times. We can’t make light of this disaster either.
Going to the details of typhoon, nearly thirty typhoons on average appear in the South Pacific Ocean in an year(mostly from August to September). Among them making for the direction of Japan, about two or three hit directly the small island. Typhoons often involve strong winds and heavy rains as well. They are very troublesome especially to people outside. On top of strong winds, the wind directions frequently change. Umbrellas will be so useless in that situation that we often get wet like taking showers in advance before going back home.
It's better not to underestimate typhoons just as heavy rains with strong winds. They cause big damages. You can easily image that the disaster caused by heavy rainfalls may be floods. Floods are caused by not only typhoons involving rainfalls. Except the occasion of typhoons, concentrated rainfalls appearing when the atmosphere is unstable bring about floods too. The residents living along rivers are worried about the disaster. In Japan that has so many rivers, there have been a lot of damages such as washing away houses, sometimes casualties if evacuations are delayed. I don’t think floods are all owing to heavy rains especially shortly after typhoons or concentrated rainfalls. There is another factor such as cutting down trees in the forest or mountains. It leads to the situation where few trees can’t afford absorb the heavy rainfalls any more.
This kind of risk, however, is still controllable if you are carefully watching the situations. For one reason, normally imaginative people can easily guess what is happening to next after heavy rainfalls. Especially the people living near rivers often overflowed have learned a lot from the bitter experiences of the disaster. For another, since the water level gradually rises before overflowing, you still have time to such an extent that you can see what's going on outside and check the water level. What factor making it possible to give a little leeway in the disasters is thankful to much public investment, promoting shore protection in addition to helping the construction industry. Even though it's impossible to carry your houses with you, maybe as the second most important thing, you and your families could be safely alive for slow coaches. Of course you've still gotten to be on your guard.
What is potentially serious is I think the floods in cities. The urban cities like other foreign ones are located by rivers or between them. This kind of disaster is caused not only by overflowing water from rivers but also concentrated downpours as I mention. Obeying the natural laws, water easily converges to lower places such as basements or underground malls. Especially in Japan, its geographical feature of the small land drives people under the ground in terms of making the most of the basement space. The case of Hakata, the largest city in Kyushu, for example, gave a lesson of how to deal with new type of disaster. On June,1999, it attacked torrential rains on the Hakata city with 80 milligram an hour. The underground malls of the JR Hakata station were saturated with rains in a short time. Unfortunately an employee at one of the shops in the underground malls died from downpours.
It’s important to recognize the characteristic of the urban city type of floods. We confront a lot of situations where we are long in basement for shopping or even business talks in Japan. Indeed some of the offices are in basement in the Japanese urban areas.
There are mainly four points to describe the features as.
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