Typhoon Hagibis

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After a Typhoon, Before a Typoon

This article documents my personal experience through two of Japan's most powerful typhoons in history, Typhoon Faxai and Typhoon Hagibis, that hit Japan within 2 months of each other.

[edited on 2019, October 16 to add Typhoon Hagibis experience]

I write this article two days before Typhoon Hagibis, "The biggest Typhoon to ever hit Japan" arrives and will follow up / edit this article to include what happened after as well. Many news outlets are predicting as follows:

• Japan Times (online edition Oct. 9, 2019) - "U.S. military's forecasting agency has put on par with a Category 5 hurricane"
• New York Times (online edition Oct. 10, 2019) - "Japan Prepares for Possible Hit by Super Typhoon..."
• Windy.com (Oct. 10, 2019) - "Hagibis (the typhoon's name) could be the strongest Typhoon for Metro Tokyo since records began"

Until the Summer of 2019 and my experience with Typhoon Faxai (see data below), honestly... I kind of liked being in Typhoons. Since I was a kid and travels in Mexico and then living in Japan for many years I had been through my fair share of Typhoons. The wind would pick up, fast & hard rain, everybody would seek shelter and you would sit in your home/room listening to banging sounds and torrential rain. In a way it somehow felt nostalgic and powerful, something humans had no control over and you just had to wait it out.

I don't like Typhoons anymore. The 2019 Faxai Typhoon I experienced changed my feelings. Until Faxai, All the Typhoons I had experienced in my life were category 1 & 2... maybe... a light category 3. The evening before it hit us I thought, "Yeah, sure... another Typhoon, no big deal." I brought in some stuff from the outside, closed the outer storm windows (many houses in Japan have these) and sat down to watch an episode of "Hornblower" on YouTube (if you have never seen Hornblower and are into the Golden Age of British Sailing Ships, it's a great watch!). As I watched an episode and started sipping on a Chuuhai (Japanese drink with Japanese moonshine and some juice), the wind started picking up. "Cool!" I thought as the Typhoon monster started it's attack the outer storm windows started to rattle.

By the time I went to bed... my eyebrows started to peak every few minutes as gusts of wind and rain, a bit more than expected, slammed into the house. "Hmmm... that's a bit stronger than I like" I was starting to get nervous. Couldn't sleep at all, the wind progressively started to get even stronger and stronger to the point that the violent shaking of the outer storm windows was ... worrying. And guess what, it didn't stop there... the wind became even stronger to the point the whole house would shake and shutter and I swear I could hear the nails holding down the roof start to creak and whine. Yep, I really thought the dang roof was going to go flying off and I was freaking out!

I jumped up out of bed and packed all important stuff into a secure suitcase. Thought of running but literally there is no where to go. Step outside into the dark and could have been blown away, impaled by flying debris or smashed by a telephone pole or tree coming down. There was literally nothing I could do but wait, my fate was purely up to nature. That.... is a very strange feeling indeed.

Luckily the winds had peaked at that extremely scary point. If the winds had gotten stronger, who knows what would have happened. Around 3:00 a.m. the winds started to die off and finally I managed to get a few hours of sleep in.

The Aftermath

Except for my nerves, I and the general neighborhood around me survived unscathed. There were a few small branches down, some tiles off roofs and general debris collected in areas but no major damage and little minor damage. However, tragically there were 3 deaths caused by the typhoon and vast areas had been left without power or water because of fallen trees and power poles. I live in Chiba Prefecture (the Prefecture East of Tokyo) which was the hardest hit by the typhoon and strangely enough, most people in Japan and even in neighboring Tokyo nobody knew exactly how hard Chiba had been hit. Some neighborhoods were without power and water for three weeks, trains had stopped for 3 days and some even up to a week.

I took a long bike ride out and about in the Chiba countryside and boy was I shocked. As I mentioned above, my neighborhood had minimal damage but within 5k (3 miles) of my house there were trees that had been toppled or snapped in half everywhere. Many of the roads I tried to bike down had become impassable because of the fallen trees and still everywhere there were trees that had fallen onto power lines and the lines were just hanging around.

The Preparation for Typhoon Hagibis

Its been just a little over a month since one of Japan's biggest typhoons hit... and yet here we are again, looking into the eye of another "Super Typhoon". My neighborhood, my cities population learned fast. The supermarkets are empty of bottled water, completely empty. Most the canned food shelves are close to empty as well as "instant" and packaged foods. Five days before the typhoon is expected to arrive people were out buying up every supply they could get their hands on. There are long lines at checkout at the dollar store (100 yen store), the hardware store and for that matter, any other store. I myself stalked up on a couple weeks worth of canned products, water, and dried foods. Now all we can do is wait.... [will update after the storm]

Friday, 2019 October 11 at 5:28 p.m. Went to 5 differnet supermarkets looking for bottled water but the shelves are empty. Most all the "Instant Ramen" type foods are gone along with canned goods. The stores are packed with people, like shopping in America on Black Friday. I suppose typhoons are a real money making boom for retailers and manufactures. Everybody has to buy all kinds of stuff they would never normally buy. Little camping gas stoves are gone, all the candles are gone, flashlights, batteries... like people are stocking up for WW3 or an alien invasion. I've come to realize something quite disturbing though. I've realized how much urban/sub-burbs people rely on other people and or shipments from other places. What would a big city do if food or help couldn't get in for a week and all the power was out? It would get barbaric!

Well, I'm buttoned down the best I can. Have about a weeks worth of food/water plus all the emergency stuff I can think of. Just hope this place doesn't get picked up and drops me in the land of Oz.

After Typhoon Hagibis

(Written on 2019, October 16) It's all the luck of the draw with natural disasters. You could be lucky and absolutely nothing happens to you or 5 miles down the road your house could have been blown away. In this case, I was lucky but unfortunately many people weren't. Chiba, the prefecture I live in, was supposed to receive the main front of the storm but Hagibis stayed left (east) of the main peninsula of Chiba.

1. NHK put the toll at 72 dead, with around a dozen people missing.
2. More than 3,000 people rescued.
3. At least 176 rivers burst their banks.
4. 57,000 homes left without power and 120,000 homes with disrupted water supply.

Typhoon Hagibus caused rivers to overflow, Nagano Japan

Ichihara, which is a city in Chiba which was hit hard by both Faxai and Hagibis is just down the road from where I live. Those poor people have been through TWO of Japan's most major typhoons in history within a 2 month time span. Unbelievably, a 5.7 magnitude earthquake occurred in the midst of Typhoon Hagibis!

Yep, so I lucked out but many didn't. Wrong place, wrong time or right place right time... just never know which side of the road you'll be on. I hope others who lives have been impacted by this disaster manage to get back on their feet and back to a normal life as quickly as possible.