The flood-ravaged city of Joso, Ibaraki Prefecture, failed to issue evacuation orders and advisories to about 350 households before a riverbank along the Kinugawa River collapsed Thursday, which may have delayed some from trying to reach safety, it was learned Saturday.

Asked why the orders were not issued earlier, a Joso city official said, “We don’t know. It may be because we were thrown into confusion.”

The evacuation order for the district east of the Kinugawa River was given after the bank collapsed, which occurred around 12:50 p.m. on Thursday. That left many of the residents stranded until they were rescued.

According to the city, there were about 450 households in the neighborhood of Misaka, which is made up of eight districts. The city issued evacuation order at 10:30 a.m. in two of the eight districts, notifying those residents there by loudspeakers several times to evacuate.

But the remaining six, which included about 350 households, were not instructed to evacuate until 2:55 p.m., or about two hours after the levee collapsed.

It has come to light that the city of Osaki, Miyagi Prefecture, where heavy rain also caused massive damage, failed to issue evacuation orders or advisories to some of its districts.

However, Hirotada Hirose, professor emeritus of disaster psychology at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, argued Joso’s response was better than those of other municipalities hit by large-scale mudslides in the past. The city started issuing evacuation orders to some areas at 2:20 a.m., five hours before the weather agency issued a special warning on heavy rain, which probably saved many lives, he said.

More than 3,000 residents of Joso, Ibaraki Prefecture, remained evacuated Sunday after floodwaters from unprecedented rainfall last week inundated vast stretches of residential areas and damaged critical infrastructure, including power, communication and drinking water supply systems.

With a total of seven deaths confirmed, including three in neighboring Tochigi Prefecture, police and rescuers continued to search by air and on the ground for the 15 people who remain missing.

Three more fatalities were reported Sunday, and two were confirmed dead in Joso — the first in the city of 65,100 located about 50 kilometers north of central Tokyo.

Joso Mayor Toru Takasugi offered an apology Sunday for a delay in issuing an evacuation order for some residents before the Kinugawa River breached its banks.

“I am very sorry. I never expected the levee to burst and failed to inform residents in areas where there were no reports about the river rising,” he told a news conference. The evacuation order was issued to about 350 households only after the river breached its banks.

Work was underway to restore power and water services in the area. Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility serving the area, said it had crews working around the clock to fix power outages.

As of Saturday night, about 11,200 homes in Joso were still without power and some 11,600 buildings in eastern parts of the city were without clean water, according to Tepco and the Ibaraki Prefectural Government

But it was not known how long it will take to restore the water supply, according to the municipal government of Joso.

Volunteers provided various kinds of support to evacuees at shelters, while residents of areas where waters had receded returned home to begin the cleanup.

Officials said more than 2,100 people were still at evacuation facilities in Joso on Sunday morning as over 4,000 houses were submerged and water supply was cut off.

Meanwhile, in Fukushima Prefecture, bags containing radioactive waste generated by decontamination work following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis have been swept away due to floods, officials said.

In the village of Iitate, the bags containing radioactive waste collected during the cleanup following the 2011 nuclear disaster were missing and some bags had leaked their contents.

The Environment Ministry said Sunday it was aware of 293 bags of radioactive waste that ended up in a river, of which 171 had been retrieved.

The number of missing in Joso dropped from 22 to 15 Saturday after police found more victims alive, including a pair of 8-year-old children.

The Kinugawa River burst its banks Thursday due to heavy rain, leading to flooding over an estimated 40 square kilometers.

In Tochigi Prefecture, also hit by severe floods, local officials said the body of Osamu Ogura, 68, was found Sunday morning in a car submerged in a flooded field in the town of Fujioka. Local police said he had drowned. Ogura had not been reported missing.

Floods also ravaged other eastern areas of the Kanto and Tohoku regions.

In Kanuma, Tochigi Prefecture, a 63-year-old woman was killed in a landslide, while a 48-year-old woman was also found dead in Miyagi Prefecture.

The third victim was a 25-year-old man helping to clear clogged drains in the city of Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, which is known for its historic shrines.

Police also found the body of a man in another river in Miyagi who was believed to be a 62-year-old missing in the prefecture, local media reported.

Since the prehistoric age, these rivers have enriched people’s lives, but at the same time snarled at them with floods. The latter fact is still reflected in the names of some of the rivers. For example, the Kinugawa River, which played havoc with large areas north of Tokyo in September, literally means a “river of a demon’s wrath,” while the Arakawa River in Tokyo denotes a “wild river.”

The Japanese people are beginning to forget to regard these rivers with the awe they deserve, and the floods in Tochigi, Ibaraki and Miyagi prefectures last month almost look like deserved punishment.

The most fundamental cause of the flooding is traced to policy mismanagement by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, in particular its refusal to deviate from the idea that building dams solves all problems related to rivers. Also responsible have been urban development projects along the rivers and the lack of knowledge about potential dangers on the part of local residents.

“Contradictions emanating from the infrastructure ministry’s past policy of controlling floods by giving top priority to building dams came to a head, leading to a breaking of levees,” says Hirotake Imamoto, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University who once headed the school’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute.

His perspective was proven correct by last month’s flooding of the Kinugawa River. Around Sept. 9, a weather phenomenon known as a linear precipitation zone appeared over the river, dumping a total of 660 mm of rain. From that day until the small hours of the following day, the ministry reduced the amount of water discharged from the Kawamata and Kawaji dams on the Kinugawa River and the Yunishigawa and Ikari dams on the Ojika River, which flows into the Kinugawa, to less than 10 percent of the normal level in some dams. Even though the ministry took these steps in line with relevant regulations, it nonetheless failed to prevent the flooding, Imamoto says.

During the period of high economic growth, the government made it a policy priority to construct dams as a way to promote and facilitate the use of water for the hydroelectric, agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

As it became less likely for water use to continue growing with the waning of hydroelectric power generation, the infrastructure ministry added “flood control” as another purpose for building dams so that new construction projects would be maintained. A good example is found in the current project to build the Yanba Dam on the Agatsumagawa River in Gunma Prefecture.

A newspaper reporter covering the infrastructure ministry says that since the flood control component of dam construction was adopted in a rush and with little forethought, the dams have failed to prevent disasters. But, he says, the ministry refuses to admit its mistake.

It is a simple fact, the reporter says, that no dam can cope when the amount of rainfall exceeds its capacity, and the country continues to be deceived by the ministry’s childish attitude.

Imamoto says last month’s flooding could very likely have been avoided had the ministry diverted portions of the river management budget to reinforcing existing levees. At the very least, he says, the damage caused by the levee collapses could have been reduced.

The ministry’s budget related to flood control exceeds ¥800 billion a year. Although some of the money goes to improving levees, nearly ¥200 billion is being spent on useless dams. Completing construction on the Yanba Dam alone is going to cost no less than ¥1 trillion.

The aforementioned reporter says, moreover, that when criticism of the dam construction policy grew, the infrastructure ministry launched a “super levee” project that calls for elevating whole areas adjacent to a river so that the entire area would serve as a levee.

This is extremely costly, however, as evidenced by the fact that a whopping ¥4.7 billion will be poured into building a super levee only 120 meters long in Edogawa Ward, Tokyo. When a similar project in an adjacent area is taken into account, the total sum would run beyond ¥2 trillion. The project is expected to take 200 years to be completed.

If the super levee scheme is seen through, it could become an effective means of preventing floods. But if the nation’s serious fiscal malaise is taken into consideration, the overall plan can only be described as “a pie in the sky.” The biggest problem is that the ministry has been so bogged down with new dam construction and super levee ideas that it has failed to implement reinforcement of existing embankments.

There are ways to prevent embankments from collapsing without spending huge sums of money, says Imamoto. It has been proven, he says, that river embankments can be made strong enough to withstand floods if steel sheet piles are driven into the ground on both sides of them.

Although the ministry has been saying there are no effective means of reinforcing river embankments, this is an outright lie. The method Imamoto advocates worked effectively when a major tsunami struck northeastern Japan in the aftermath of the huge 2011 earthquake.

The cost of driving steel sheet piles is said to be about ¥1 million per meter of embankment, which is infinitesimally smaller than the ¥30 million needed to build the same length of super levee.

Why, then, is the infrastructure ministry reluctant to adopt the sheet pile method? A ministry insider points to two reasons: one is that the ministry fears being held accountable for pursuing policies centered on dam construction, and the other is that the super levee project would become unnecessary.

Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that officials’ eagerness to protect their own positions and interests led to the calamities of September.

Imamoto also points out that it was a big mistake to build houses in the area flooded last month because it is geologically depressed lowland. In the old days, that area was used for agriculture where farmers planted hedges to divert water and kept boats in their barns in case they had to flee floodwaters. Today, however, the residents have none of these preparations. Similar situations are found in many other parts of the country.

Last year, landslides in the city of Hiroshima caused great damage and many deaths. In the past, people had avoided living in these districts out of fear of landslides. The Japanese people are forgetting experiences and precautions needed to live safely with rain, rivers and land that can cause calamity. And the infrastructure ministry’s culpability is obscured by the repeated excuse that the type of flooding that hit the Kinugawa River occurs only once every half a century.

Not only is it urgent for the government to review its river management policies, but the general public must also reflect on the notion — based on arrogance — that flooding is easy to control.

This is an abridged translation of an article from the October issue of Sentaku, a monthly magazine covering political, social and economic scenes.