From our other sites
The story
Photos and on-the-ground reports of the flooding across Chiba Prefecture have been pouring into 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (general live-news) board. Around Lake Inba the water still hasn’t receded — one report says a fish farm was completely submerged with an estimated 1 billion yen in damage, and some expect it could take about three months before the Uchibo rail Line resumes service. Congestion on Route 16 has worsened, compounded by landslides on detour roads, leaving traffic gridlocked. In the thread, some suggested the cause may not be river overflow but groundwater welling up from the ground itself, while others voiced concern about further rain and an approaching typhoon.
What people said
There's still more coming~!
Chiba had groundwater welling up out of the ground during the 3/11 earthquake too, so the ground there was probably always prone to this. They've neglected infrastructure maintenance, and now one typhoon or heavy rain and this happens.
Because I want to go cheer on the Lotte Marines
South of Chiba City there's no rail line to run replacement service on, so anyone without a car is basically forced to change jobs
Meanwhile, the roads:
Is this a bullet-hell shooter or something?
and I was shocked to hear the damage estimate is roughly 1 billion yen
Koi are seriously expensive, huh
At the world's top-tier individual level, koi go for tens of millions to over 100 million yen
that's not really possible until the water recedes, right?
They'll probably stack flexible container bags as makeshift sandbags just to stop the water from flowing out
Looks like rain will continue for a while and a typhoon might be coming too, so they need at least emergency measures in place
There's no way to recover at this rate…😱
Though in exchange, distribution seems to have been cut off upstream, since fresh food has vanished from AEON
That's quietly rough, honestly
Somewhere around Kisarazu?
These days, having distribution grind to a halt really hurts
The Kumamoto earthquake also cut off distribution between northern Kyushu (Fukuoka, Saga) and southern Kyushu (Miyazaki, Kagoshima)
Come to think of it, Lake Inba is apparently a massive breeding ground with something like 10,000 snapping turtles living in it
There's no way I'd ever step into a puddle that overflowed from there
I hear they're pretty tasty, apparently
Yikes… that's a seriously dangerous lake, isn't it…
If those things end up scattered everywhere, that's genuinely bad news, right?
It's already congested as it is, but side roads are blocked here and there by landslides
and all the trucks on Route 464 (toward Lake Inba/Inzai) are getting rerouted that way too, so it's basically hopeless
It's the usual story, but the Yobizuka intersection is even more finished than usual
Chiba's nothing but bad traffic spots anyway
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The area around Lake Inba was originally reclaimed low-lying wetland, and it’s said to be land that also suffered groundwater flooding during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Opinions in the thread were split over whether this flooding is a temporary result of rivers overflowing, or whether water is continuously welling up from the ground itself. If it’s the latter, the water level won’t drop quickly even once the rain stops, which would mean a longer recovery. Worth noting is that the impact on transportation and daily infrastructure — the Uchibo Line’s expected suspension, congestion on Route 16, and a shortage of fresh food from halted distribution — was reported alongside concrete figures. At the same time, many posts were seen unilaterally blaming residents of the affected area with comments like “it’s their own fault for living there,” but those have been excluded from this article. Care should be taken not to conflate glib remarks about place names and terrain with actual reports of the damage.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Photos] Chiba’s current situation, “living hell”: water levels not receding.”
Leave a Reply