Typhoon kills nine people in Japanese nursing home

Nine people were killed when floods hit an old people's home in Japan, police said on Wednesday, taking the death toll from a typhoon battering northern parts of the country to at least 11.

Police found nine bodies on Wednesday in the nursing home in the town of Iwaizumi, in Iwate Prefecture in the north of Japan’s main island of Honshu, but it was not clear when their home was flooded.

It was also not clear why people there had not been taken to safety before the storm struck. The nursing home is located near a river and was partially buried in mud and debris when the river overflowed its banks.

Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the home was for people with dementia.

“The area is in a state of chaos. We are not sure what preparations the facility had taken,” said a prefectural government official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The town issued evacuation preparation information on Tuesday morning, which is to inform elderly or disabled people who take time to evacuate. That, however, was not as strong as an evacuation warning, according to another prefecture official.

More than 1,000 other people were forced from their homes by the flooding brought by Typhoon Lionrock.

The body of a man was also found near a river in Iwaizumi and a dead woman was found in Kuji city, police said.

Further north, on the island of Hokkaido, at least two rivers broke through their banks. The fire and disaster management agency said at least one person went missing while driving or riding in a car that went down with a bridge torn away by the flood.

Authorities in the town of Minamifurano reported hundreds of people trapped in houses and shelters by flooding from the Sorachi river, the agency said.

Hundreds of other people were also trapped in buildings and isolated in several towns in Iwate. Typhoon Lionrock made landfall on Tuesday evening near the city of Ofunato, 310 miles north east of Tokyo on the Pacific coast and crossed the main island of Honshu before heading out to the Sea of Japan.

It was the first time a typhoon had made landfall in the northern region since 1951, when the Japan Meteorological Agency started keeping records. Iwate prefecture, the hardest-hit by the typhoon, is one of the areas still rebuilding from the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake, which left more than 18,000 people dead along Japan's north-eastern coast.

Agencies