Most of the deaths in Hiroshima, one of the hardest hit prefectures, were from landslides in areas where homes had been built up against steep slopes, beginning in the 1970s, said Takashi Tsuchida, a civil engineering professor at Hiroshima University.
“People have been living for 40 to 50 years in an area that had latent risk, but decades went by without disaster,” he said.
“But intense rainfall has become more frequent, and the hidden vulnerability has become apparent,” he said, adding that people live in many such dangerous areas.
Though the weather has cleared up, the disaster goes on.
A new evacuation order went out on Tuesday in a part of Hiroshima after a river blocked by debris overflowed its banks, affecting 23,000 people.
Another storm, Typhoon Maria, was bearing down on outlying islands in the Okinawa chain but it had weakened from a super-typhoon and was not expected to have any impact on Japan’s four main islands.
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