The rain that fell on Chiba on 13 and 14 August put cars under water across the prefecture, and the count of how many is still being given in different shapes. Speaking on the 20th at a meeting of assembly chairs from the one metropolis and nine prefectures of the Kanto-Koshinetsu region, held at a hotel in Chiba City's Chuo ward, Governor Toshihito Kumagai said the number of damaged vehicles was, in his words, comfortably over ten thousand. Chiba Nippo reports him saying the figure had at one point run to more than two thousand in Chiba City alone and higher across the prefecture, and that counting private car parks and home garages took it well past ten thousand. He described a city that had gone under water in an instant. Nippon TV, reporting the same remark, puts it the other way round — that the governor indicated damaged vehicles could reach ten thousand.
What that number looks like on the ground is a car park. Nippon TV's crew went to the one at Chiba City Hall on the 22nd and found cars lined from one end to the other: vehicles that had been left on roads around the city, gathered in one place so owners could be reunited with them. The city was processing handovers through the weekend to speed that up.
One of the people there had driven two and a half hours from Kanagawa. She had been told that morning her turn for towing had come, went to where the car had gone under, and found nothing. It took calls to the city before she learned it had been moved here. She saw it again after a week. It is going to be scrapped.
Elsewhere in the city the recovery crews were not local either. Special support teams from the Japan Automobile Federation, assembled from around the country, were working residential streets on the 22nd. Nippon TV followed one call-out to a man who had three cars parked in front of his house go under. The one he minded was a black car bought big enough to take his mother travelling — he and his wife had meant to drive it until it died.
Chiba City and the prefecture are now contacting owners of vehicles left where they stopped, to establish who wants theirs collected and who is giving it up.
Why it is on the board
Fifth on Nippon TV's most-read list when we collected.
The two accounts do not sit at the same distance. Chiba Nippo has the governor's sentence and the meeting he said it at, and stops. Nippon TV has the car parks, the tow trucks and the people, and reports the same sentence at one remove. The same figure arrives as a floor in one paper and a ceiling in the other.
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