Tokyo Preparing For Floods 'Beyond Anything We've Seen' (tampabay.com) 98
In the face of an era of extreme weather brought on by climate change, global cities are working to improve their defenses. The New York Times reports (Warning: may be paywalled; alternative source) of Tokyo's $2 billion underground anti-flood system that consists of tunnels that divert water away from the region's most vulnerable floodplains. The city is "preparing for flooding beyond anything we've seen," says Kuniharu Abe, head of the underground site. From the report: But even in Tokyo, the onset of more frequent and intense storms has forced officials to question whether the region's protections are strong enough, a concern that has become more urgent as the city prepares to host the 2020 Olympic Games. Across Japan, rainfall measuring more than 2 inches an hour has increased 30 percent over the past three decades, the Japan Meteorological Agency estimates. The frequency of rainfall of more than 3 inches an hour has jumped 70 percent. The agency attributes the increase of these intense rains to global warming, heralding a new era in a country that is among the world's wettest, with a language that has dozens of words for rain. [...]
Experts have also questioned the wisdom of erecting more concrete defenses in a country that has dammed most of its major river systems and fortified entire shorelines with breakwaters and concrete blocks. Some of these protections, they say, only encourage development in regions that could still be vulnerable to future flooding. In eastern Saitama, where the Kasukabe facility has done the most to reduce floods, local industry has flourished; the region has successfully attracted several large e-commerce distribution centers and a new shopping mall. Still, the Kasukabe operation remains a critical part of Tokyo's defenses, say officials at Japan's Land Ministry, which runs the site. Five vertical, underground cisterns, almost 250 feet deep, take in stormwater from four rivers north of Tokyo. A series of tunnels connect the cisterns to a vast tank, larger than a soccer field, with ceilings held up by 60-foot pillars that give the space a temple-like feel. From that tank, industrial pumps discharge the floodwater at a controlled pace into the Edo river, a larger river system that flushes the water into Tokyo Bay.
Experts have also questioned the wisdom of erecting more concrete defenses in a country that has dammed most of its major river systems and fortified entire shorelines with breakwaters and concrete blocks. Some of these protections, they say, only encourage development in regions that could still be vulnerable to future flooding. In eastern Saitama, where the Kasukabe facility has done the most to reduce floods, local industry has flourished; the region has successfully attracted several large e-commerce distribution centers and a new shopping mall. Still, the Kasukabe operation remains a critical part of Tokyo's defenses, say officials at Japan's Land Ministry, which runs the site. Five vertical, underground cisterns, almost 250 feet deep, take in stormwater from four rivers north of Tokyo. A series of tunnels connect the cisterns to a vast tank, larger than a soccer field, with ceilings held up by 60-foot pillars that give the space a temple-like feel. From that tank, industrial pumps discharge the floodwater at a controlled pace into the Edo river, a larger river system that flushes the water into Tokyo Bay.
Take China as an example (Score:4, Interesting)
30 years ago whenever the monsoon struck or if there was a flood, number of dead were in the hundreds, sometimes, thousands
Today's China, the death have fallen drastically due to a lot of extra-ordinary water channeling projects China has undertaken
Re:Take China as an example (Score:5, Informative)
Back in September 2011 two sequential typhoons hit the southern end of Honshu, Japan's main island and the subsequent flooding killed about 90 people. Killer typhoons hit the Japanese islands pretty much every year.
Japan is a dangerous place to live, even more dangerous than California with its earthquakes, mudslides, floods and fires. Planning to control and mitigate such disasters is a necessary part of government hence the uprating of the flood control systems already in place around Tokyo.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Too bad they don't have a plan to deal with sea level rise. Unless they can turn the whole island into a boat (if anyone could do it, it would be Japan, but... no) then they're just fucked over the medium term, let alone the long term.
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... and Godzilla. They have no defences against Godzilla either.
Not true. They have Mothra to defend themselves from Godzilla.
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Too bad they don't have a plan to deal with sea level rise.
Don't let the Dutch know, their country might sink.
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Don't let the Dutch know, their country might sink.
Pretty much their country is also threatened. There's a limit to what you can accomplish with dikes.
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Too bad they don't have a plan to deal with sea level rise.
Especially when the big earthquake of 2011 caused a 2 foot drop in the elevation of the Honshu coastline. Sudden events like that are impossible to predict.
Anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a child, my family lived in the Tokyo area for a while. The first couple of years we were there, we lived in a suburban area that was pretty crowded, albeit with mostly low-rise residential and commercial properties.
Our rental house sat about halfway up a fairly steep hill, at the bottom of which was an open-air market crowded with noodle vendors and the like. When I was five, there was a pretty intense typhoon. As I recall, it rained continuously for three days - and I mean it just bucketed down to the point where it was difficult to see the houses across the one-and-a-half-lane street.
The fourth day was clear, bright, and almost cloudless, so I finally got to go outside again. I wanted to visit the marketplace, but I couldn't, because the bottom of the hill was submerged under about 10 feet of water.
So, local severe flooding is nothing new for Japan - although I have no doubt it's getting worse - and addressing it via infrastructure improvements is certainly non-trivial in a nation whose population is almost entirely urban nowadays.
(BTW - I also experienced my first major earthquake in that house. It had to have been at least a 6.5, because it lasted at least half a minute. But that's a story for another time ... )
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Levees and vaults are great, until they fail.
These constructions reduce the frequency of flood damage, but when they fail the areas they protect are generally unprepared for the failure - and the failure tends to be dramatic.
They also have (heretofore) unforeseen consequences with respect to deposition of sediments, shoreline erosion patterns, etc.
It is an expensive solution, both in up front and (punful) downstream costs. Simply moving high density development away from the low lying areas is far more eco
Re:Take China as an example (Score:4, Informative)
Try to tell that to countries which check the following boxes:
-high population density
-little develop-able high ground
Examples: Japan, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, various pacific atoll-island nations.
Now filter out the countries that:
-have enough technical expertise to be capable to defend against flooding
-have enough wealth or capability to raise capital to invest in water management projects
-are politically stable enough to effectively plan for long-term flooding defences
Strike the first two, keep the rest.
Be glad you live in a country where non-coastal land is in abundance, for you can ridicule global warming induced rising sea-levels all you like (unless you choose to live in Florida). We know if we don't invest now, and stay investing, we'll be destroyed soon(tm). Water management is a necessary part of keeping our nation... a nation and not a giant flood plane. Having said that, please consider some nations don't have the technology/money to solve these problems they were mostly not responsible for in the first place... Which will probably mean another stream of refugees in a couple of decades. Not that it's of your concern....
Re:Fake News (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed about the willingness of people to believe fake news such as global warming. Scientists have yet to present credible evidence that humans are causing global warming. The propagandists continue to promote their message that humans are responsible, but without hard evidence, we shouldn't believe that humans are causing the Earth to get warmer. There may well be legitimate reasons to prepare for possible dosasters, especially in an area that experiences powerful typhoons. But that isn't a reason to invoke the myth that humans are causing global warming.
You are the only one to invoke it, there is not a single word about human causes in TFA and it's entirely irrelevant in its context.
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You are the only one to invoke it, there is not a single word about human causes in TFA and it's entirely irrelevant in its context.
The effect of global warming is visible for pretty much anyone to see. Probably much worse than the scientists say since they only talk about things that they have hard proven evidence for - "beyond reasonable doubt" rather than the "balance of probabilities" standard you would use to decide something in a civil court or a sane person would use to decide whether to take action. The only possible way the global warming denialists can persuade people to ignore that reality is for them to challenge everythin
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So the raw data is available. Why hasn't anyone posted graphs based on that? The answer is because they still show warming. In fact if you go back 100 years the raw data shows a higher rate of warming than the adjusted data (mainly because of the way sea surface temperatures were measured before WW II with buckets thrown over the side that cooled some before they got them on deck to measure the temperature).
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It is a stone fact there has been no warming of any kind, man-made or natural, in the past 20 years.
Surely you mean a stoned fact? Because that is the only way this makes any sense.
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Re: Fake News (Score:1)
This is also irrelevant as the only thing that matters here are the locally increased flooding events, regardless of the reasons
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Troll.
Humans are causing global "warming" and that is more complicated than just warming, it's causing weather extremes, changes in food (food absorbs more carbon, becomes less nutritious and much larger) and sea level rise from melting ice.
If all ice melts today, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States will be flooded up to I95. The West coast will fare a bit better.
At the rate things are going right now, humans will not be around much longer. It will simply get too hot, and we haven't figured out
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Re:Fake News (Score:4, Informative)
Statistics are your mathematical friend. Last we heard, critters other than humans were not digging up long buried hydrocarbons in statistically significant ways and dumping them into the atmosphere to catch those beautiful sun rays.
Humans and other causes of global warming (Score:3)
Humans are causing global warming but so is everything else. Everything affects everything else.
That statement is so vague as to be almost meaningless, but, yes, for a restricted set of "everything", it is true.
The vagueness lies in the unaddressed question, how much global warming is caused by humans, and what is the effect of that? The answer is, an estimated 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees of global warming is caused by humans due to each doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the air, and the effects of that are hard to calculate, but will definitely include sea level rise, shifts of growing are
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm amazed about the willingness of people to believe fake news such as global warming. Scientists have yet to present credible evidence that humans are causing global warming. The propagandists continue to promote their message that humans are responsible, but without hard evidence, we shouldn't believe that humans are causing the Earth to get warmer. There may well be legitimate reasons to prepare for possible dosasters, especially in an area that experiences powerful typhoons. But that isn't a reason to invoke the myth that humans are causing global warming.
Just because you're too stupid to recognize credible evidence about global warming doesn't mean that there isn't any. I'll start believing that global warming is fake news once people like you start producing credible evidence that the warming is natural.
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Scientists have yet to present credible evidence that humans are causing global warming.
OK, then. You explain the increase in rainfall that has been observed in Japan over the last 30 years.
Your explanation must be backed by sound theory, historical evidence, and peer-reviewed research. We're all looking forward to receiving your wisdom. Best of luck, and godspeed.
Re:Real News but called fake by big oil supporters (Score:1)
We are doomed. With stupidity like this as rampant as it is, it's hopeless.
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Global warming is an irrelevant factor to such defenses. Any large metropolis that wants to maintain such a classification for hundreds of years must assume that a 1,-10,000 year event of each major natural disaster present in the area has a good chance of occurring and should engineer accordingly if it wants to remain a large metropolis after the fact.
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Whoever is "impersonating" you seems to be doing a decent job as their incoherent retarded gibberish is indistinguishable from your incoherent retarded gibberish.
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Bias has never been a problem for people who can think.
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Bias of any sort is a problem for everyone. It's a gentle nudge in a direction, not a hard push.
If you think intelligence keeps you from being influenced by bias, or being biased yourself, you're deluding yourself.
Tokyo in the Future (Score:2, Offtopic)
As we all know, in the near future (20XX is coming up fast!) Tokyo will be nothing but skyscrapers accessed via flying car, so it doesn't much matter if the ground is permanently flooded or not. For rural areas, look on the bright side: no having to manually flood your rice paddies, they come pre-flooded for your convenience!
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Is it really that hard to divide by three as you read?
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The source numbers can't be in inches, is it really that hard to quote the actual metric numbers from Japan and put inches in brackets?
Obligatory pun (Score:5, Funny)
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Storm water drains (Score:1)
"Tokyo's $2 billion underground anti-flood system that consists of tunnels that divert water away"
You mean like storm water drains/sewers? Like most of the cities in the world has? I know it's useless to complain, but why does everything have to be hyped up!?
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"Tokyo's $2 billion underground anti-flood system that consists of tunnels that divert water away"
You mean like storm water drains/sewers? Like most of the cities in the world has? I know it's useless to complain, but why does everything have to be hyped up!?
But they're "Library of Congress" sized storm drains.
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Because it's not just storm drains. They have active measures to control the flow of water.
Some places are fine with simple storm drains, but apparently Japan has required more extensive infrastructure.
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And really not that much either. Austin just blew 163 million on a flood control tunnel for downtown. One tunnel. Another factor the article may not have covered is impervious cover. The more development you have the more concrete that covers soil that previously soaked up rain. Austin is kind of a drought/flood area. I've wondered after living here awhile if maybe building codes should be changed so a cistern of say 50K gallons is required for new houses. This would absorb huge amounts of water during heav
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What I am suggesting is much like the city imposed a new drainage fee to ALL residents because new construction caused more flooding, maybe the time has come to make the new guy bear the cost for the problem they create. As to size, I'm suggesting that the size of the cistern offset the additional runoff of the construction. For a typical 2500 sq ft house in Austin, I am guessing that is around 50K gallons. And yes that is a big cistern. We can get a foot of water in a day with some regularity.
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And Miami Beach is expecting to spend close to $500 million to combat the effects of rising sea level. That might buy them and extra 30-50 years before they have to abandon the city since sea level will continue rising for several hundred years at least.
Tokyo Preparing For 'Beyond Anything We've Seen' (Score:5, Funny)
But will they be prepared for the surge of water when a 100 m tall monster rises from Tokyo Bay and rampages through the city?
Cross your fingers (Score:2)
Ob (Score:4, Funny)
History shows, again and again, how nature points out the folly of men.
Foods beyond anything we've seen (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, floods. Boo.
Indeed (Score:2)
Japan is threatened more by Climate Change, because it is nearer to China who invented it, according to a fucking moron.
Galatea and Akira (Score:3)
This is fake news.
The "tunnels for floods" is a cover up.
The real reason for the network of tunnels is to provide hidden burial places for Akira and Galatea.
Nuff' said!
Preparing for what? (Score:2)
Is is bad that I read the title as:
Tokyo Preparing For Foods 'Beyond Anything We've Seen'
?