By
The Associated Press
TOKYO - Boulevards became muddy rivers and hundreds of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate yesterday as torrential rain soaked central Japan, killing at least five people and forcing the nation's biggest carmaker to stop production.
Authorities in the city of Nagoya told more than 360,000 people to evacuate their homes, city official Tadanobu Horiguchi said. Many sought shelter on the second or third floors of schools.
The dead included a 53-year-old firefighter who fell into a flooded roadside ditch and a 49-year-old man who was buried in a mudslide, Horiguchi said. Three other people were killed, 32 were injured and three were missing, the national Police Agency reported.
Nagoya-based Toyota Motor Corp. stopped production nationwide because of the relentless downpour, a company spokeswoman said. The company has a highly interdependent network of parts-makers, which means a stoppage in the flooded Nagoya center would affect operations in other areas.
Television footage showed residents wading waist-deep in muddy water and children navigating flooded streets in rubber inner-tubes. Troops in rowboats paddled past inundated buses to rescue stranded residents.
Fourteen homes were demolished by landslides, and more than 12,000 were flooded above the floor level, police said. Landslides happened in 310 places.
Nagoya, a major industrial city of 2.2 million people, is about 165 miles west of Tokyo. Rainfall totaling 23 inches was recorded in Tokai, near Nagoya, over the past 24-hour period, the local observatory said.
"This flooding is unprecedented in our city," Horiguchi said. "I've never seen such huge rainfalls in such a short period of time."
Power outages interrupted bullet train service to the region, the Prime Minister's Office said. About 50,000 passengers were forced to sleep overnight at railway stations or in stalled trains, rail officials said. Service resumed after a record interruption of more than 18 hours.
Major highways in central Japan were also closed to traffic, national broadcaster NHK reported.
The governor of Aichi state, where Nagoya is located, requested disaster relief from the national government, the prime minister's office said.
Elsewhere yesterday, a tornado swept through residential Tokyo, destroying the roofs of several homes, a Tokyo police official said. There were no reports of injuries.
More violent weather was creeping toward Japan, as typhoon Saomai approached the southernmost prefecture of Okinawa with 90-mph winds. The storm was about 60 miles east of the Okinawa capital of Naha early yesterday and was already lashing the island with powerful winds.
Naha is about 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo.
