Nine people have died after torrential rains battered eastern Japan, with officials calling the downpour unprecedented, the public broadcaster NHK reported on Sunday.
The heavy weather, which arrived late Thursday, triggered landslide warnings, caused widespread power outages, and left more than a thousand homes under water. Roads and rail services were severely disrupted across the region.
For the first time ever, forecasters issued the highest level of heavy rain alert for Chiba prefecture. One weather station in the area recorded 300 millimetres (nearly 12 inches) of rainfall within 24 hours, marking the region’s wettest August in six decades.
By Friday morning, the city of Chiba had logged more than three times the amount of rain it normally receives for the entire month, according to Tokyo’s land ministry.
NHK, which compiles its own figures, said Sunday morning that nine fatalities had been confirmed. The prefecture’s disaster management office, however, had counted eight deaths as of Saturday evening, with some victims found trapped in submerged cars and others discovered on flooded streets.
Chiba’s latest tally showed that more than 70 houses were partially destroyed by the rain, and over 1,000 households reported flooding. In nearly 600 of those homes, water rose above the floorboards.
Local media estimated that around 1,200 cars have been abandoned on roads, with authorities working to tow them away or use jacks to shift them.
Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, an official from Japan’s meteorological agency said the situation was “shaping up to be an unprecedented level of heavy rain.”
Scientists say human-driven climate change is making extreme weather more frequent, prolonged, and intense.
