Last week we had a pretty strong typhoon come through our area in the middle of the night. We knew it was coming, and my company was nice enough to let everyone go home early before the trains shut down so we could prepare the house.
It was a sleepless night as the winds banged away at our windows and sometimes you could feel the entire house shake from the gusts. In the end the typhoon passed, and we could get a couple hours of sleep before going to work. There was some minor damage around the neighborhood, but we counted ourselves lucky.
Yesterday, another typhoon came through. This is number 21 for the season, and it was forecast to pass through our area in the middle of the day. Once again, both my company and Kuniko’s company gave us time off to avoid a stressful and possibly dangerous commute. We both had the whole day off.
The night before I did some shopping to make sure we had enough food and alcohol to get us through – and as it turned out the typhoon wasn’t quite as strong as the previous one. There were occasional gusts of wind and some diagonal rain, but to be honest it was a bit anti-climatic.
But as we learned from the earthquakes in Japan, just because it wasn’t a big one for you doesn’t mean it wasn’t bigger somewhere else.
We were shocked to see some of the news afterwards, with images of a runaway tanker that slammed into the road and rail links to Kansai International Airport. The airport was also flooded and experienced some loss of power, stranding some poor people there while flights were grounded. It seems like it will be out of action at least a couple of days. The typhoon caused problems in other parts of western Japan, and we were really lucky to have missed the brunt of it.
I’m back at work this morning, and the train system is starting to recover. I think it will be a stressful commute for a lot of people today, and things won’t be back to normal for a little while yet.
We dodged a bullet this time, but September is usually typhoon season in Japan, and there are sure to be more coming later this month.
