Rescue workers raced to find the 14 people still missing in Japan in the aftermath of Typhoon Hagibis, with local news agency Kyodo News reporting that the death toll had climbed to 73.
Japan has deployed 110,000 personnel from its fire department, self-defense force and police , as well as 110 helicopters, as part of its search and rescue efforts.
Authorities are still trying to provide a complete estimate of the damage, but figures emerging on Tuesday released by Kyodo News painted a devastating picture: 66 levees had been broken across the country’s rivers, with 13,000 houses submerged and 900 homes completely or partly destroyed. The northeastern Fukushima Prefecture was the hardest-hit area, with at least 26 dead, according to the NHK.
In Nagano in Japan’s Chūbu region, a maintenance yard for the iconic Shinkansen bullet trains was flooded, with ten trains and 120 carriages damaged.
On Tuesday morning, Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga issued an update on the situation, stating that the Panama-registered cargo ship that had sunk off the coast of Kawasaki was that seven of the 12 crew members were confirmed dead with one missing. It is known that many thousands remained without power and water across Japan, as 32,000 blackouts and 112,00 water outages were confirmed in the morning by Suga.
Hagibis was the most powerful typhoon to of the year so far and was ranked violent—Japan’s highest category onthe typhoon scale—by the country’s meteorological agency.
