Commentary by Hank F. Miller Jr. (Hank is a former resident of Gloucester City, who lives in Japan)
Someone asked me why I haven\’t written about Typhoons? And have I ever experienced one? Well yes, I have been through many typhoons as well as earthquakes here in Japan too. The timing of the question came just as a typhoon was forecast for our area.
A very powerful typhoon targeted Kyushu this past weekend. \”Man-yi\” was forecast to approach and possibly make landfall in Kyushu on Saturday afternoon and then travel along the Southern Coast of Honshu through the Kanto region over the long weekend,
Today being a holiday called \”Sea Day, \”The Meteorological Agency said.
The season\’s fourth typhoon, which hit Okinawa, Prefecture and part of the AmamiOshima island group on Friday, injuring at least 37 people and killing three so far, forcing many people to evacuate, to local shelters.
This leading to power cuts and cancellations of airline and railroad services.
Okinawa came out of the typhoon\’s heavy storm zone after 20 hours; the agency said that this was the biggest and most powerful storm in years to hit Kyushu. The typhoon was heading straight for Kitakyushu City after devastating parts Makurazki, Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Oita, Kumamoto, prefectures.
This typhoon was packing winds of up to 216 kilometers per hour, with an atmospheric pressure of 945 hectopascals near its center.
The total rainfall has topped 400 millimeters in some areas, and thus is expected to reach more than 1,000 mm through Sunday and on Monday here in Kitakyushu, city it\’s raining like cats and dogs as I\’m writing this commentary.
Well here at the Miller home we\’re very well fortified with being on the top of a small mountain with having block walls all around and our home structure is made of pre-formed concrete, with aluminum siding and steel storm shutters over the windows, to ward of any part of flying debris or other objects that may hit us as well as the storm force surges. During the day we put all the garden furniture, plants etc. up on our small verandah and tied everything down and covered the plants which were a great many.
Well last Saturday night we went to bed about 10:30 P.M. We closed up everything and went to bed; we were getting extremely powerful wind gusts. As we tried to sleep we could hear loud crashing noises coming from the street below and a lot of banging as well as the rain was pounding on the roof and siding.
It does get scary at times during these typhoons here in Japan believe me.
We did manage to fall asleep; when we woke up on Sunday morning we didn\’t hear any strong winds such as we heard the night before just the heavy rains. We went down stairs and I went outside to have a look around, I couldn\’t believe we had bit the bullet once again.
It seems that the storm came near us in Kyushu city and blew out to sea according to the Metrological Agency broadcast Sunday morning.
It seems that the storm skirted along the Pacific Sea coast and out to sea thus down- grading to a tropical storm.
But I had quite a lot of cleaning up to do and mind you I worked in a driving rain and wind to clean all the debris up.
Remember it\’s still monsoon season here too in this part of Japan.
What I found when I went out was roofing tiles littered about pieces of peoples corrugated plastic car port roofs etc. littered about our garden and in the street and the open storm drains, it was a real mess to clean up, thank the Lord that was all we had to clean up.
Yesterday, I cleaned for about 4 hours or so picking up all the junk, leaves branches, even a few different odd old slippers they use when they leave home, they put them outside the front door. I put everything out for the trash collectors that came around today.
As for the neighbors in the wooden structures near us they were hurting, some lost part of their roofs, trees were toppled, rain spouts were blown away etc.
But all in all we came out on top and I consider that we were extremely lucky once again.
The winds were so powerful and we didn\’t get the whole brunt of the Typhoon\’s eye this time.
\”Take care and stay safe during this summer\’s hurricane season.\”
Warm Regards from a Very Rainy Kitakyushu City, Japan
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