Flood in Chiba - Typhoon approaching Tokyo

A little movie I took as I walked from our apartment to the lobby.

There is a Typhoon (Hurricane) hitting Japan today. It is currently south of Tokyo and not expected to arrive here until tomorrow, and since a Typhoon's ultimate path is unpredictable, it is not sure yet if we will get a direct hit or not.

However, we are already getting rain and alot of it this morning. Our street flooded quite quickly (this is not usual, we don't get flooding on our street usually) and since the lobby of our building is street level (with no curb even) the water was flowing in.

Our building is constructed to accommodate a steel barrier that is put up to block water in such cases and hopefully avoid flooding of the first floor (we are on the first floor incidentally). So once we saw that it was getting bad outside in the garden, Ken went outside to check the lobby. Some other men from our building were there too and they all started to quickly put the barrier together. It are 4 steel panels that once put together, form the watertight barrier about knee high. Since the lobby was already flooded, after getting the barrier up they had to pump out the water with a machine we have for that. So nice to have the 'men' on guard!

The lobby is clear now (and the road has drained) and the rain has stopped, but I'm afraid it is only a sample of what we might expect here in the next 24 hours. Hopefully the storm will make a turn out to sea before it moves north more towards us!

Here are the pics from this morn...thought you'd all find them interesting... Click on the pictures to enlarge if you like...

Our lobby glass doors and our helpful men folk putting up the barrier. First row is up and they are beginning to set up the second row.

Second row of the barrier being put into place. Notice the water level outside the barrier, even just the first row of the barrier was starting to have an affect.

Barrier in place, time to start pumping water out of the lobby. Across the street (I mean 'river', ha ha) in the background, you can see our parking area, which thankfully is raised above street level, otherwise we might have been worrying about our car too! There's my super-hubbie working hard, standing on the outside of the barrier.

Our flooded street, taken thru the fence of our garden. If you look carefully, you can see the line painted on the road under water, just below that cement wall (there is a field on raised ground there that a neighbor owns and farms).

A van barreling down our flooded little street.