Hot weather threatens volunteer work in flood-hit areas in southwestern Japan

July 30, 2017

Hot weather threatens volunteer work in flood-hit areas in southwestern Japan

The two local high school girls were serving bottles of cooled drinks to volunteers on their departure to assigned places in areas hit by recent floods and landslides in Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu, southwestern Japan.
They looked proud of their job which helps protect volunteers' physical condition amid a long spell of very hot weather toward the end of July.
The girls, accompanied with their boss, were manning one of the booths set up at the main volunteer reception facility in Asakura City, hardest hit by the disaster. The heavy rainfalls, which continued for a few days from July 5, triggered floods and mudslides in riverside areas  in the city and neighboring regions. leaving over 40 persons dead or missing and hundreds of houses damaged and inundated.

Kyushu, a largely rural region, has been ravaged by natural disasters twice in two years; an extensive killer earthquake hit Kumamoto Prefecture in April 2016.
Related local authorities and organizations appear better prepared than before to manage the post-disaster mess,  but the situation remains to be fully improved, for example, in terms of systems to sort out volunteers and properly support their jobs at the affected places, experts say.
Volunteer reception points in Asakura were flocked with volunteers on the first and second weekends after the disaster and as a result, some of them remained unregistered to be sent until in the afternoon. One volunteer was hit by a heatstroke and taken to a hospital.
Individual volunteers came up on weekdays and on weekend, while groups of volunteers came usually on the weekend.

As relief work made progress, many volunteers came in groups to the affected areas after being processed by dispatcher organizations. The system must be improved mainly for accepting individual volunteers on weekdays.
Individual volunteers must be divided into different segments--first-timers or not, and volunteer policyholders or not, and then, first-time volunteers receive orientation before being matched with others to be a team of 10 or so under a mutually selected leader.
"We have accepted 400 to 500 volunteers  a day this weekend, but there was no problem, because they had been well organized by a volunteer dispatcher before coming to us," said a leader in one of the affected communities.
"We could let them start their jobs quickly only after giving them a brief explanation," he said.  
Those dispatched for relief work in the community were mainly students attending a high school of Fukuoka City, the prefecture's capital.
The students kept working under a scorching sunlight as dust rose from the dried mud.
Some of them tried hard to take out mud from under the floor of inundated houses. Others collected the debris from the flooded areas and cleaned ditches buried with mud on an alley.
"We'll return to the community center where we were accepted this morning and take a lunch there, and then work again until 2:30 in the afternoon," a leader student said.
"This is our first day of activity here, because we just entered the summer vacation," he said. Part of the students are expected to be back again before their vacation is over.
Japan has come to realize that it should make itself even more resilient to natural disasters, not just by reinforcing hardware infrastructures for disaster prevention but also by enhancing software-related systems, such as those for early weather warning, quick evacuation to shelters and smooth volunteer acceptance.
The experience the student volunteers have obtained this time is expected to contribute to further refining Japan's disaster relief system from now on.