Typhoon Aftermath
That’s how high the Tama River was yesterday, near Futako-Tamagawa Station
Today when I woke up, it was hot and sunny. It didn’t seem possible that twelve hours ago, the biggest typhoon in sixty years was raging through Tokyo. So I went out to take a look at one of the places that had been evacuated – a neighborhood next to the Tama River.
The left map below is what the sleepy Tama-gawa is usually like – a narrow band of water, lined with parks and soccer fields, picnic grounds and baseball diamonds. On the right is how it looked during the typhoon. The river spread out to its farthest banks, and then some, flooding basement apartments and shops along the street that runs alongside it.
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Two days ago, these were soccer fields
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Two days ago, this was a park
I found a few pictures of the area on the net, and although they’re not taken from the same angle, you can get the idea of how much the place changed after Typhoon Hagibis had its little rampage.
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Hyogojima Park
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That’s the same little bridge. See how those trees sticking up on slightly higher ground are right in the middle of what’s now a very muddy rushing river?
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On the other side of the bridge, the path slopes down to a running course that used to be well inland. See the debris wrapped around the fenceposts? Those posts were underwater yesterday.
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In fact, you can see yesterday’s waterline, because this debris was floating on the surface as the river jumped its banks. The guy in the white t-shirt walking down the ramp would have been wet up to his fundoshi last night
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Everything that wasn’t swept away was turned into creepy haystocks
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And lots of uprooted trees point the way downstream
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Only in the aftermath of a heckin’ huge typhoon, can kids go FISHING in sidewalk puddles.
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But what are they catching?
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These. They’e scooping up the little brown fish you see swimming there by its not so lucky compadre
Oh, and by the way, I learned something. I kept reassuring people that even though it looked scary on the weather maps, it wasn’t a hurricane, it was just a typhoon. Which I think of as a rainstorm that didn’t skip leg day at the gym.
But…I was wrong! Turns out, the only difference between a hurricane and a typhoon is that hurricanes originate in the North Atlantic, and typhoons originate in the Northwest Pacific. Cyclones (I’ll tell you for free), are the same storm, but hail from the South Pacific and mostly wreak havoc in that other hemisphere.
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And therein lies a nugget of useful wisdom amid this spectacularly Instagrammable disaster: most of the time, being in the middle of something that looks like the end of the world isn’t like that at all. Even the biggest typhoon to hit Tokyo in sixty years just felt like a heavy rainstorm with a side of annoying wind. The only hardship 99.9% of us suffered is that we had to soldier through without our iced lattes.
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