The cell phone received a heavy rain alert at 8 AM Wednesday morning. For the rest of the day, we got warnings on the radio that made it sound like we'd be hit by a typhoon, lose power, and maybe water service. Lots of media-induced hysteria. One of the two English classes I was supposed to have in the evening was cancelled (the other was cancelled too, but that was for other reasons). I had to do some food shopping for dinner in the middle of the afternoon, and I made a point of going the 4 blocks over to the Kotsuki river to check out how swollen it had gotten.
It's generally pretty shallow, but it looks like it is up 2-3 feet this time. I'll have to compare it to some other photos to know for sure. But, I've never seen the above sewer runoff backed up like this before. Since the river empties out into the bay a few miles away, if they have the control gates down, there shouldn't be any dangers of it overflowing the banks.
It certainly looks high.
About half of the shops I looked at were still open, including a bike repair shop, and a dry cleaners. Most restaurants either never opened for the day, or had signs on the doors saying that they'd close either at 3 or 4 PM. The cafes that were open had no customers. Tenmonkan was largely deserted, especially in this area. Funny enough, the only other people here when I arrived were a TV crew filming some older guy in a suit walking along the empty arcade. Most of the people were actually one street over.
I guess the basement bar, Wicky's House, didn't want to take any risks of flooding. I think the bulk of the storm missed us, but we're just getting into typhoon season, so this won't be the end of it by any means. As of Thursday morning, the rain had ended and the sky was starting to clear up.
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