We had a long, hard deluge of rain on Friday night into Saturday morning. Thunder boomed; lightning crackled. Kamogawa announced a Level 4 evacuation and the local school opened up as a shelter for anyone in landslide territory. It was a big deal.
It was hard to sleep, so the cats and I were up in the middle of the night watching it. I wasn’t alone; friends posted their storm photos on Facebook. Kengo and Hitomi came across the Aqualine during the thick of it. Whoa.
Saturday dawned and the worst of the rain had passed. Tod & I drove out into the world, skirting around minor rockfalls on 88 and noting the skill and speed with which crews were cleaning up the mud.
But one place had a very bad night. The mountainside repair on the road to Heguri collapsed where it had been repaired less than a year ago. The first landslide happened July 3rd, 2021. It took almost two years to fix it. And it’s closed again a year later because that didn’t quite work.
Tod went to check it out this afternoon and got these photos. Looks like the edges collapsed on both sides, sending rocks and mud tumbling all the way down to the road surface. Some of the gabion rolled right over as well.
It’s going to take a while to fix this; I guess we’ll be back to the one-lane traffic controlled road (now marked as a footpath) that we lived with for over a year during the repairs. In the meantime, Tod says the local guys are just opening the barrier and driving through, then closing it again so nobody will ever suspect.
I didn’t post here about the 2021 landslide or its repairs, so here’s a gallery of what happened. The road reopened fully in spring of 2023 while we were deep into building the house and I didn’t get a single picture of the completed repairs.
I am curious to see what they come up with as a fix for this latest mess. Will they reshape the edges to a gentler slope? Put in more reinforced concrete? I do not envy the civil engineers who need to figure this out.
