[After a typhoon’s record-breaking rains
breached dozens of levees, the country is wondering whether even the costliest
systems can be future-proofed for the age of climate change.]
By Ben Dooley, Makiko Inoue and Eimi
Yamamitsu
 |
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A
view of a breached levee in Naganuma, Japan, on Tuesday.
Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
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NAGANUMA,
Japan — The time was 1:30
a.m., and Hiroshi Ogawa was trying to decide whether he should run from the
biggest typhoon to hit Japan in decades.
His home stood near the Chikuma River in
Nagano Prefecture, separated from the rising waters by a levee. “I had
confidence in the levee,” Mr. Ogawa, 68, said. “I had faith that it was built
to withstand a hundred-year flood, so it should be O.K.”
It was not. A little over an hour later, the
levee burst, submerging his home and sweeping away everything in it. He barely
escaped: Minutes before, he had driven to higher ground after being warned by
volunteer firefighters to flee.
The levee, in an area northwest of Tokyo, was
one of at least 55 breached as Typhoon Hagibis dumped record-breaking rains on
Japan last weekend, with more than 70 people dying in the storm and floodwaters
hitting more than 10,000 homes.
Japan, a nation grimly accustomed to natural
disasters, has invested many billions of dollars in a world-class
infrastructure meant to soften nature’s wrath. But with the flooding in areas
across central and northern Japan in recent days, the country has been forced
to examine more deeply the assumptions that undergird its flood control system.
That is raising a difficult question, for
Japan and for the world: Can even the costliest systems be future-proofed in an
age of storms made more powerful by climate change?
Yasuo Nihei, a professor of river engineering
at the Tokyo University of Science, said that in places around Japan, “we’re
observing rain of a strength that we have never experienced. When we look at
the costs, I think it’s clear that flood control programs need to be
accelerated.”
Even so, he said, “realistically, there will
be rains you can’t defend against.”
That has not always been the view of the
Japanese government. For centuries, it has seen disaster management as a
problem to be solved by engineering.
After a devastating typhoon killed more than
1,200 people in the late 1950s, Japan embarked on a series of public works
projects aimed at taming its many rivers. Levees and dams sprang up on nearly
every river, and civil engineers sheathed long stretches of riverbeds in
concrete.
While the projects have saved countless
lives, they are insufficient to meet the challenge of increasingly extreme
weather patterns, said Shiro Maeno, a professor of hydraulic engineering at
Okayama University.
“In the current state, it wouldn’t be strange
for a flood to happen anytime, anywhere,” Mr. Maeno said. “Things we never
could have considered have started happening in the last few years.”
The heavy investment in infrastructure has
not come without a cost. The spending has helped send Japan’s national debt to
record highs, as the country has approved many projects that turned out to be
minimally effective or, at worst, damaging to the environment.
The Japanese government has also used
infrastructure spending to stimulate an economy that was stagnant for decades.
Critics note that some of the projects are little more than a tool for
enriching construction companies, with part of the proceeds being returned to
local politicians in the form of campaign donations.
Whatever the motivation for the spending,
engineers are warning that as storms grow in intensity, the government faces
diminishing returns as it contemplates raising levees or digging new drainage
tunnels. But in the wake of the typhoon, the burning question among Japanese
politicians is whether the country should be investing even more.
Daniel Aldrich, a professor of political
science at Northeastern University in Boston who studies disaster management,
said that huge engineering projects had often provided a false sense of
security, leading people to avoid what can be a more effective response:
evacuation.
“Why would you possibly leave when you have
this system set up to protect you?” he said. “Why go anywhere? It’s a moral
hazard when you believe the systems in place will protect you more than the
process of fleeing, which is of course what we really want.”
In 2017, the national government passed a
revision to the country’s flood and river controls laws aimed at decreasing the
mounting economic damage from extreme weather and bringing the number of deaths
caused by the failure to evacuate down to zero — a challenge made greater by
the country’s rapidly aging population.
The changes have forced local governments to
revise how they prepare for disasters. Instead of planning for 100-year storms,
they are now thinking about more destructive once-in-a-thousand-year disasters.
Last summer, Nagano city, which administers
Naganuma, where Mr. Ogawa’s house was inundated, redrew its flood maps. The old
maps, drawn up in 2006, imagined a situation in which Naganuma could be covered
with up to 16 feet of floodwater.
But planners now imagine a much worse
scenario: 16 inches of rain over two days, resulting in more than a dozen levee
breaches and leaving Naganuma drowning under 65 feet of water.
Even that might not be pessimistic enough.
Last weekend, when Typhoon Hagibis hit Hakone, a mountain resort town south of
Tokyo, 39 inches of rain fell in 48 hours.
In a city like Tokyo with millions of people,
the planners’ thousand-year projection might justify spending billions on
high-tech flood prevention systems.
But in a rural area like Naganuma, the
government needs to make tough choices, said Hiroki Okamoto, a local official
in charge of managing the Chikuma River.
“We have to move forward with the
understanding that no matter what’s installed, there will be a flood that it
can’t defend against,” Mr. Okamoto said. The government needs to shift its
focus to “doing public relations work so that people will evacuate” during
floods, he said, adding, “It’s hard to get them to run.”
That thinking goes against the mainstream,
said Dr. Aldrich, the professor at Northeastern University.
“As societies think about how to deal with
global climate change, many of them are starting to switch to an engineering
mind-set, when they should be placing more emphasis on so-called soft measures
like encouraging neighbors to help each other evacuate ahead of a disaster,” he
said.
“A lot of societies in North America or
Singapore or Japan have become fixated on the idea that we’ll engineer our way
out of this problem,” he added. “We’ll build floating buildings or better
sensors, which is all well and good, but what do you do if your cellphone
doesn’t work? Or you don’t have access to electricity?”
In Naganuma, where rescuers have so far
recovered two bodies from the area near the levee breach, it was those “soft
measures” that saved people like Mr. Ogawa and the 400 others who evacuated the
area.
Mitsuyoshi Oguchi, a local handyman, said
that every year the entire town — which has a long history of flooding —
participated in evacuation drills. At a temple close to the river, a wooden
pole more than 10 feet tall records the area’s major floods. Near the top, the
year 1742 is written in thick, black Chinese characters.
On Saturday evening, as the waters rose, city
officials called residents and begged them to leave. Volunteers, including Mr.
Ogawa’s wife, Kyoko, went door to door, helping their elderly neighbors make
the trip to an evacuation center.
Still, few residents expected that a typhoon
would break the levee in their lifetimes.
On Wednesday, construction crews raced to
repair the gap in the Chikuma levee. Cranes lowered giant concrete blocks
shaped like jacks into the breach, then covered them with dirt. On the far side
of the levee, where low fields run to the riverbank, hundreds of apple trees
were covered to their crowns in muddy water.
Here and there, residents took the first
steps toward recovery, shoveling out their homes and dragging away waterlogged
furniture.
“We’re lucky,” Mr. Ogawa’s daughter Natsumi
said in front of her parents’ stately home, one of many houses built with money
from the orchards. “All of our furniture got washed away, so there’s not much
to clean up.”
Mr. Ogawa himself was not quite so sanguine.
His home and his apple business will recover, he said, but he’s not sure he
ever will.
“Even if the levee is fixed, every time
there’s a heavy rain or a typhoon, my chest is going to tighten,” he said.
“I want to move to a place where my family
can live without worrying.”
Correction: Oct. 16, 2019
Earlier versions of several picture captions
with this article misidentified the location shown in the images. It was
Naganuma, not Nagano.
Ben Dooley reports on Japan’s business and
economy, with a special interest in social issues and the intersections between
business and politics. @benjamindooley
