EDITORIAL: Submerged bullet trains show need to prepare for future disasters

The flooding of Hokuriku Shinkansen train cars could have been prevented if East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) had been sufficiently aware of the risks posed by a powerful typhoon.

In the city of Nagano, where torrential rain triggered by Typhoon No. 19 caused the banks of the Chikumagawa river to give way, all 120 Shinkansen cars at a rail yard were flooded. If all of them have to be scrapped, the railway operator will suffer a loss of more than 30 billion yen ($276.2 million).

As it seeks to restore disrupted services on the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line as early as possible, JR East needs to examine the disaster to figure out how it could have been avoided and make all-out efforts to prevent a recurrence.

The rail yard is located between the Chikumagawa and the Asakawa rivers. The areas around the yard have long been recognized by the local communities as vulnerable to flooding.

The old “hazard map” to visualize high-risk areas in the city developed by the Nagano municipal government indicated the areas could be submerged to a depth of more than five meters.

But the revised version published in August says floodwaters could reach a depth of somewhere between 10 and 20 meters, signaling greater risks than previously assumed.

Disaster management experts say the company could have taken measures to prevent the train cars from being flooded, such as moving them onto the Shinkansen line, which runs on higher ground, if the company had taken the revision to the hazard map as a serious warning.

That would not have been a tall order. JR East actually moved cars parked in a train yard for the Tohoku Shinkansen Line, located in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, before the typhoon hit, thereby sparing them from damage.

Even though the city of Nagano was not directly in the projected path of the storm, JR East’s own indifferent responses to the approaching typhoon have underscored the company’s costly failure to judge the risk accurately and assess the possible consequences for the Shinkansen cars in Nagano.

The company says it will review the in-house rules for dealing with risks of flooding. It needs to work out plans for responding to various meteorological conditions and share them with other train operators and parties concerned.

There are multiple Shinkansen train yards operated by other JR companies located in areas believed to be vulnerable to flooding.

All JR companies and other train service operators should take a cue from the flooding of Shinkansen cars to inspect and reassess the disaster-related risks facing important facilities for their operations and work out measures to reduce them.

JR East has announced that the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line will resume service along its entire route between Tokyo and Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, from the first train on Oct. 25. The Hokuriku Shinkansen service, however, will be limited to a smaller number of train runs for the time being.

The local business community in Ishikawa Prefecture, which has seen tourist traffic grow steadily since the Shinkansen line opened in 2015, is fretting about possible negative effects on the local economy.

Disruptions in key elements of social infrastructure, such as bullet train services, inevitably hamper flows of people and goods with serious consequences for people’s daily lives.

When Typhoon No. 21 struck the western Kansai region around Osaka last year, the power sources at the Kansai International Airport were crippled by high waves and tides.

Typhoon No. 15, which hit Japan in September, caused prolonged large-scale blackouts in wide areas in Chiba Prefecture, causing exhaustion to a large number of local residents.

Last year, the government launched a three-year, 7-trillion-yen program to enhance embankments and reinforce the slope faces of railway lines.

But such civil engineering projects will not help much unless the operators of the facilities become keenly aware of the risks and be willing to take the necessary steps to deal with them.

It is important for railway operators and other infrastructure companies to develop timetables of necessary responses to typhoons and other predictable disasters that spell out the specific measures that should be taken from several days before and the people responsible for them.

Such timetables should be reviewed regularly for each category of disaster.

The moral is that there is no better way to deal with disaster risks than making daily efforts to prepare for them.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Oct. 24