Saori Kuwabara, 39, was busy wiping mud off her family’s possessions Saturday. The office in their Joso City home north of Tokyo was stained by a brown pool of water.
“I want to wash the floor off but I can’t,” said Kuwabara, an office worker. “No water.”
In some ways, the lack of additional water was refreshing. Two days earlier, heavy rains from Typhoon Etau had resulted in widespread flooding in several neighborhoods of the city of in Ibaraki Prefecture.
When a short stretch of the levee for the Kinugawa River broke, the raging waters submerged nearly 4,600 properties.