Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia's forest: study

Yahoo – AFP, Patrick GALEY, February 24, 2020

Australia's annual average forest loss to wild fires is typically well below 2 percent --
but a study has shown around 21 percent was lost between September and January
(AFP Photo/SAEED KHAN)

Paris (AFP) - Australia's wildfires have destroyed more than a fifth of the country's forests, making the blazes "globally unprecedented" following a years-long drought linked to climate change, researchers said Monday.

Climate scientists are currently examining data from the disaster, which destroyed swathes of southeastern Australia, to determine to what extent they can be attributed to rising temperatures.

In a special edition of the journal Nature Climate Change, Australian researchers examined several other aspects of the blazes, including investigations into their extent and possible causes.

One study showed that between September 2019 and January 2020 around 5.8 million hectares of broadleaf forest were burned in New South Wales and Victoria.

This accounts for roughly 21 percent of the nation's forested area, making this fire season proportionately the most devastating on record.

"Halfway through Spring 2019 we realised that a very large part of the eastern Australian forest could be burned in this single season," Matthias Boer, from the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University, Penrith, told AFP.

One study author warned the data almost certainly underestimates the extent of

forest loss as the island state of Tasmania was not covered by the research (AFP 

Photo/PETER PARKS)

"The shock came from realising that this season was off the charts globally in terms of the percentage of the continental section of a forest biome that burned."

Boer said his study almost certainly underestimates the extent of forest loss as the island state of Tasmania was not covered in the data.

Australia's annual average forest loss to wild fires is typically well below 2 percent.

Droughts linked to sea temperature

Another study published Monday looked at the conditions that made the fires so damaging -- a years-long dry spell in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin.

Droughts create more fuel for wildfires and make it harder for forests to recover after each blaze.

Andrew King, from the University of Melbourne, and colleagues looked at a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), which has a direct effect on rainfall levels in Australia and elsewhere.

Since 2017 much of Australia has experienced widespread drought, something the study attributed to a relative lack of negative IOD events -- when there are warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the east Indian Ocean with cooler waters in the west.

Climate scientists are currently examining data from the disaster, which saw swathes 

of southeastern Australia destroyed, to determine to what extent they can be attributed

to rising temperatures (AFP Photo/TOM BANNIGAN)

These events tend to shift weather patterns and typically bring greater rainfall to southeast Australia, and are made less frequent as global sea temperatures warm.

King and the team examined rainfall statistics and found that the winter of 2016 saw extremely heavy precipitation and a corresponding negative IOD event.

Since then, the Murray-Darling Basin has experienced 12 consecutive seasons with below-average rainfall, the longest period on record since 1900.

"With climate change there have been projections that there will be more positive IOD events and fewer negative IOD events," King told AFP.

"This would mean that we'd expect more dry seasons in Australia and possibly worse droughts."

Boer said that climate change was all but certain to make Australia more prone to wildfires and urged the government to strengthen fire readiness measures and "take urgent and effective action on climate change."

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Right fire for right future: how cultural burning can protect Australia from catastrophic blazes

The Guardian, Lorena Allam, Sat 18 Jan 2020

Traditional knowledge has already reduced bushfires and emissions in the top end, so why isn’t it used more widely?

Kija Rangers conduct prescribed burning in the East Kimberley in 2019.
Photograph: Supplied/Kimberley Land Council

Indigenous fire practitioners have warned that Australia’s bush will regenerate as a “time bomb” prone to catastrophic blazes, and issued a plea to put to use traditional knowledge which is already working across the top end to reduce bushfires and greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is a time bomb ticking now because all that canopy has been wiped out,” says Oliver Costello of the national Indigenous Firesticks Alliance.

“A lot of areas will end up regenerating really strongly, but they’ll return in the wrong way. We’ll end up with the wrong species compositions and balance.

 “That’s why we need to get Indigenous fire practices out into the landscape in the coming months, to start to read the country and look at areas that need restoration burning in the short term.”

As Australia comes to terms with this season’s catastrophic fires, Indigenous practitioners like Costello are advocating a return to “cultural burning”.

What is cultural burning?

Small-scale burns at the right times of year and in the right places can minimise the risk of big wildfires in drier times, and are important for the health and regeneration of particular plants and animals.

Different species relate to fire in different ways, Costello explains. Wombats, for example, dig burrows to escape, while koalas climb into the canopy.

“When you understand the fire relationships they have, their own fire culture, then you are really applying the right fire for that culture so that you’re supporting the identity of that place.

“When you do that, you get more productive landscapes, you get healthier plants and animals, you get regeneration, you discourage invasive elements, which are sometimes native species that might belong in the system next door.

“It’s so important to apply that right fire for right country, so you can maintain the right balance.”

Aboriginal rangers and traditional owners conduct burns in the Katiti-Petermann
 Indigenous Protected Area, in the remote desert country near the Western
Australia and Northern Territory border. Photograph: Helen Davidson/The Guardian

Dr David Bowman is a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. Bowman describes Indigenous fire management as “little fires tending the earth affectionately”.

“The affectional is the opposite of mechanical. It’s with emotion. So it can be reverence, affection, fear, a whole range of emotions, but it’s an emotional relationship you have with land using fire to create mosaics and flammable habitat mosaics, which are really good for biodiversity and a really good way of managing fuel load.”

Where is it used in Australia?

In northern Australia, Indigenous land ownership is widespread. Caring for country and ranger programs in protected areas has delivered a degree of autonomy to traditional owners to walk the country, burning according to seasonal need and cultural knowledge.

Indigenous fire management involves “cool” fires in targeted areas during the early dry season, between March and July. The fires burn slowly and in patches.

In the Kimberley, the Land council holds community fire planning meetings throughout the early dry season to ensure the correct people are burning their country.

“Traditional owners are consulted and native title holders design burn lines and fire walk routes,” the KLC acting CEO Tyronne Garstone says.

“These burn lines are approved by the group and Indigenous rangers perform the on-ground work, backed up by modern technology with rangers taking constant weather readings and recording the conditions of the day.

“They work very well at combining the old people’s fire practices with modern techniques.”

Even so, climate change is affecting their ability to do “right way” fire management, Garstone says.

“These ‘right way’ fire days are getting fewer and fire behaviour is changing along the same lines as over east. Late season conditions are also driving more fires in unusual ways due to the climatic conditions we are currently facing.”

Kija Rangers conduct prescribed or ‘cool’ burning in the East Kimberley
in the dry season, 2019. Photograph: Supplied/Kimberley Land Council

How effective is it?

The Darwin centre for bushfire research at Charles Darwin University maps bushfires weekly. Since traditional burning was reintroduced on a large scale, the centre has collected enough data to show that the area of land destroyed by wildfires has more than halved, from 26.5m hectares in 2000, to just 11.5m hectares in 2019.

“We have annual fires up here,” the centre’s research fellow Andrew Edwards says. “Forty per cent of the top end could burn every year. So we had to do something about that.”

“We were originally much more interested in biodiversity, Aboriginal employment and getting people back on country to manage it properly, but when the carbon economy came along we saw a way to manage fire to abate greenhouse gas emissions.

“It was pretty bad before that happened,” Edwards says. “It was just fires running wild across huge tracts of north Australia that nobody was doing anything about.”

Edwards says the top end cooperative model can be adapted to southern conditions.

“That’s what needs to be looked at. Obviously there’s a lot more infrastructure to set up, but it’s collaboration and education.

“If we want to manage our natural environment properly, we need to be doing prescribed burning. There’s so much cultural knowledge out there still, and it’s being totally ignored. There’s hundreds of Indigenous rangers out there now doing this work.”

The Oriners and Sefton Savannah Burning Project creates carbon credits, using
strict scientific methodologies, approved through a rigorous accreditation process
with the Department of Environment, to store carbon in the natural landscape.
Photograph: Richard Wainwright/Caritas Australia

Will these practices be widely adopted?

In southern Australia, Oliver Costello says, Aboriginal knowledge systems are far less valued but hold important solutions.

The Coag national bushfire management policy includes a commitment to “promote Indigenous Australians’ use of fire”, but Indigenous fire groups like Firesticks Alliance say they need more resources to build capacity.

“There are a lot of policy settings at a high level that support us, but there’s nothing in between. There’re no resources,” Costello says.

“There’s no investment really outside of northern Australia Indigenous fire management of any significance, and they had to build a whole new economy to support it through carbon.

“There’s always investment going into future firefighting capacity, more trucks, more helicopters, more this, more that. What we need is people getting out into the landscape now, with the knowledge to start to heal it.

A small cool burn managed by Indigenous firesticks alliance.
Photograph: Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation/PA

Professor Bowman says it is possible to “blend Aboriginal with European and modern scientific approaches to create an opportunity for all land users and land owners”.

He suggests small-scale local “Green fire” groups modelled on the Landcare program.

“I would like to see a crossover between Indigenous and mainstream fire management groups, where there can be exchange and recognition.

“Because in the end there’s two things which are important to [remember]: all humans have come from a fire management background in their cultures, it’s just that some cultures ended up obliterating that knowledge because of industrialisation.

“We should really prioritise employment of Aboriginal people. But when there’s a gap we could be filling that gap with community groups. And there’s a really good opportunity for Aboriginal people to be involved in training.

“We need to encourage and promote the philosophy of Aboriginal fire practice because that’s going to be a really important pathway for sustainable fire management and also for healing because so many communities have been traumatised and shocked by the scale of the burning.”

Costello says the areas that haven’t burned this time around are now even more vulnerable.

“They are critical parts of the landscape [that need] to be able to support the animals and plants that have survived. And so those areas are going to be under increasing pressure and they’re also at risk of a future fire.

“There was an economy before settlement that supported this, a resource economy based on people looking after the land and having all that they needed.

“Now in the modern society it revolves around money. So we need to build economies that support cultural practice and acknowledge traditional custodianship.

“There’s all this canopy that’s been burnt away. We’ve got knowledge and techniques that can help heal that country in the future. It’s going to take some time. We’ve got probably two or three years before we can really be effective in some of that country because it needs to recover. But if we don’t get in there after that, then we miss our chance.”

The much welcomed rain in Australia might be too much of a good thing, as flash floods were reported in some area https://t.co/rNjVYeiU9T pic.twitter.com/Bgml3Yz50f

— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 18, 2020

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Power supply fears as troops called to battle Australia bushfires

Yahoo – AFP, Holly ROBERTSON, with Andrew Beatty and Glenda Kwek in Sydney, ,January 4, 2020

Temperatures have soared above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in Australia,
and gale-force winds have fanned hundreds of fires (AFP Photo/PETER PARKS)

Skies turned black and ash rained down as fires raged across southeastern Australia on Saturday, threatening power supplies to major cities and prompting the call-up of 3,000 military reservists.

Temperature records were smashed, and gale-force winds pounded fire-stricken coastal communities in the two most populous states New South Wales and Victoria.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian warned that worst-case scenario projections were "coming to fruition", although large-scale evacuations meant the human toll was minimised.

Since late September, 23 people have died, more than 1,500 homes have been damaged and an area roughly twice the size of Belgium or Hawaii has burned.

Location of areas affected by fires since September 2019 in Australia (AFP Photo/Simon MALFATTO)

The latest fatalities were in Kangaroo Island -- a tourist haven southwest of Adelaide -- when two people were trapped in a car overrun by flames on Friday.

But strong winds and high temperatures continued to fuel hundreds of fires and cause chaos.

Bushfires took out two substations and transmission lines, prompting authorities in New South Wales to warn that an area home to almost eight million people and the nation's largest city Sydney could experience rolling blackouts.

"We are in for a long night and we have still to hit the worst of it," Berejiklian warned as another total fire ban was declared for Sunday.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the largest military call-up in living memory, mobilising 3,000 reservists to assist thousands of volunteer firefighters who have been battling the blazes.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called up 3,000 military reservists to tackle 

Australia's relentless bushfire crisis (AFP Photo/PETER PARKS)

"Today's decision puts more boots on the ground, puts more planes in the sky, puts more ships at sea," said Morrison, who made the announcement after being pilloried for his response to the deadly disaster.

But even that move prompted outrage when his Liberal Party turned it into a campaign ad, with shadow minister for international development Pat Conroy accusing Morrison of trying to "exploit a national tragedy".

Record temperatures

A state of emergency had been declared across much of the heavily populated southeast and more than 100,000 people were told to leave their homes across three states.

Thousands heeded that call on Friday, abandoning summer holidays and piling into cars that clogged the highways linking southeastern coastal towns with the relative safety of Sydney or larger towns.

With temperatures expected to rise, a state of emergency has been declared across 

much of Australia's heavily populated southeast (AFP Photo/SAEED KHAN)

Several emergency warnings were issued on Saturday, and there were fears that one blaze southwest of Sydney could reach the city's outskirts.

Sydney recorded its highest-ever temperature of 48.9 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit) in the western suburb of Penrith, and the nation's capital Canberra hit 44 degrees Celsius, also an all-time record, a Bureau of Meteorology spokesman said.

Thousands of volunteer firefighters battled the infernos as some residents stayed behind to defend their homes.

Just outside the seaside town of Batemans Bay, a four-hour drive south of Sydney, locals joined forces with firefighters to tackle the blazes.

A dehydrated and injured Koala receives treatment after its rescue from a bushfire 

(AFP Photo/SAEED KHAN)

"Today, we've had nothing short of a disaster. A very large fire-front came through... the high temperatures and the southerly change is putting a real lot of pressure on the resources that we have," local Adam Pike told AFP.

"Guys that know the bush, guys that know fire, helped save at least 10 to 12 homes on this street... we are so grateful for their help."

The only activity in the usually bustling tourist hotspot was at an evacuation centre, where hundreds of locals forced from their homes were sheltering on an open field in tents and caravans.

A helicopter drops water on a bushfire in Batemans Bay in New South Wales (AFP Photo/

PETER PARKS)

Mick Cummins, 57, and his wife fled to the evacuation centre when fire ripped through their rural town on New Year's Eve.

"We said this is too tough for us, let's get out. We went to the beach and then hellfire came over the hill," he told AFP.

"I was here in the '94 fires. I thought that was bad. That was just a barbeque" in comparison, he said.

Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison (L) has faced sustained anger for his
handling of the months-long bushfire crisis (AFP Photo/James ROSS)

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'Noah's Ark' seed vault chalks up a million crop varieties

Yahoo – AFP, February 26, 2018

Since opening on February 26, 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has taken
in more than a million different seed varieties (AFP Photo/Larsen, Hakon Mosvold)

Longyearbyen (AFP) - Norway's 'doomsday' seed bank, which seeks to protect the world's crops from natural disasters, on Monday said it had gathered more than a million varieties as it marked its 10-year anniversary.

Dubbed the "Noah's Ark" of food crops, the Global Seed Vault is located deep inside a mountain on Svalbard, a remote Arctic island in a Norwegian archipelago and has the capacity to store up to 4.5 billion seeds.

Launched in 2008, the Svalbard vault was on Monday marking its 10th anniversary by taking shipments of more than 76,000 seed samples, with depositors from all over the world delivering crops such as black-eyed peas, the Bambara groundnut and the Estonian onion potato.

Although housed in Norway, the seeds belong to the donor states and institutions and they can withdraw them at their convenience.

The delivery raises to 1,059,646 the overall number of unique crop varieties deposited in the so-called "doomsday vault" since it opened on February 26, 2008 with the aim of providing a "fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters."

"I am extremely happy to announce that more than one million seeds will pass through this door to be secured forever," said Norway's Agriculture Minister Jon Georg Dale.

The vault currently has 967,216 varities as some Syrian grains were withdrawn with the aim of re-introducing local strains after the fighting in Aleppo ended.

There are 1,700 gene banks around the world that safeguard collections of food crops and many of these are exposed to natural disasters and wars, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Located 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole, the Svalbard archipelago, which is twice the size of Belgium, counts 2,300 inhabitants and is considered the ideal place for the vault due to its remoteness, far from civil strife.

"Noah's Ark" seed vault, located deep inside a mountain on Svalbard, chalks up a million crop varieties https://t.co/d9W5RmE1px pic.twitter.com/FXAbqwbwLj

— AFP news agency (@AFP) February 27, 2018

Last three years hottest on record: UN

Yahoo – AFP, Ben Simon, January 18, 2018

The planet's record-breaking hot weather has caused severe drought in places
like here in South Africa. (AFP Photo/Rodger BOSCH)

Geneva (AFP) - The last three years were the hottest on record, the United Nations weather agency said Thursday, citing fresh global data underscoring the dramatic warming of the planet.

Consolidated data from five leading international weather agencies shows that "2015, 2016 and 2017 have been confirmed as the three warmest years on record", the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.

It added that 2016 remains the hottest year ever measured, due to the warming effect of El Nino, while 2017 was the warmest non-El Nino year beating out 2015 by less than one hundredth of a degree.

"The long-term temperature trend is far more important than the ranking of individual years, and that trend is an upward one," WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

The 21st century has so far been a period of the hottest weather, accounting for 17 of the 18 warmest years on record.

"And the degree of warming during the past three years has been exceptional," Taalas added.

The WMO also highlighted the intensification of weather and climate related disasters, which hit record levels in the United States last year, while multiple countries were devastated by cyclones, floods and drought.

The WMO findings were based on data provided by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US space agency NASA, Britain's Met office, the European Centre for medium range weather forecasts and the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Using those inputs, the UN said that the average global surface temperature last year was 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.98 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

"Basically, all of the warming in the last 60 years is attributable to human activities," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

The warmth also led to the second smallest average annual sea ice coverage on record in the Arctic, NOAA said.

Reacting to the results, experts warned that the planet is moving closer to a set of red lines laid out in the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement.

That treaty calls for capping global warming at "well under" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

"When even 'colder' (non-El Nino) years are rewriting the warmest year record books we know we have a problem," said Dave Reay, the Carbon Management chair at the University of Edinburgh.

"Global temperatures will continue to bob up and down from year to year, but the climate tide beneath them is rising fast."

'Focus' needed

There is mounting global consensus on the need to slash CO2 and methane emissions, improve energy efficiency, and develop technologies to remove CO2 from the air.

But US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris accord has rattled the international community and complicated efforts at forging joint action -- even though many US state governments insist they remain committed to cut emissions.

Since industrialisation took off in the early 19th century, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by nearly half, from 280 parts per million to 407 parts per million.

Trump will head to the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, an annual gathering of global elite, where he will confront some of the political and civil society leaders who fought hard for the Paris deal.

"Collaborative efforts" to combat unprecedented shared challenges will be a major theme of meeting, WEF boss Klaus Schwab said this week.

"The record temperature should focus the minds of world leaders, including President Trump, on the scale and urgency of the risks that people, rich and poor, face around the world from climate change," said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the London School of Economics.

The World Meteorological Organization consolidated data from five leading international weather agencies, highlighting the intensification of weather and climate related disasters https://t.co/gZSJE8m1wM pic.twitter.com/ntfk5qvNo1

— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 18, 2018

Rotterdam and Groningen to share new climate agency

DutchNews, September 21, 2017

Part of the Dutch Delta Works flood prevention scheme

A new international agency for sharing expertise on adapting to climate change will be split between Groningen and Rotterdam, junior environment minister Sharon Dijksma has announced. 

The Global Centre of Excellence on Climate Adaptation (GCECA), which is being set up by the Netherlands with backing from Japan and the United Nations’ environment programme, will be launched next year. The Netherlands is investing €1m in the project. 

With a workforce of several dozen, the agency will develop an international network of universities and institutes, companies, government and financial sector firms to support organisations working on climate adaptation. 

In Rotterdam, the agency’s staff will be housed in a floating, climate neutral office complex, while in Groningen they will be part of the Energy Academy Europe.

Announcing the launch of the project in February, Dijksma said: ‘Failure to deal adequately with climate change will increase a multitude of risks such as natural disasters, social and economic disruption and increasing political tensions. 

Many people are looking for good practices and guidance with regard to climate change adaptation. I am convinced the Global Centre of Excellence on Climate Adaptation can help address these challenges.’ 

Related Article:

Cyclones and climate change: connecting the dots

Japan residents trapped as city hit by raging floods

Yahoo – AFP, Harumi Ozawa, 10 Sep 2015

A local resident is rescued by a helicopter in Joso, Ibaraki Prefecture, on

September 10, 2015 (AFP Photo)

Joso City (Japan) (AFP) - Dozens of people were trapped in buildings and several were missing after powerful floods ripped through parts of Japan Thursday, in the wake of torrential rains.

Military helicopters plucked stranded residents from roofs after waters surged over a wide area when a river burst its banks, swamping a city of 65,000 people.

A hotel building falls into the floodwaters

 at Nikko mountain resort in Tochigi

 prefecture, north of Tokyo on 

September 10, 2015 (AFP Photo)

Dramatic aerial footage showed whole houses being swept away by raging torrents, in scenes eerily reminiscent of the devastating tsunami that crushed Japan's northeast coast in 2011.

One man was seen clutching a concrete post as waters swirled around him.

No one had so far been confirmed dead, but there were reports of people missing, including in landslides that buried buildings.

Trapped

Television pictures from Joso, a small city north of Tokyo, showed desperate residents waving towels as they stood on balconies trying to summon assistance.

"Please continue to ask for help. Please don't give up hope," an anchorman for public broadcaster NHK told trapped viewers.

More than 100,000 people were ordered to leave their homes after a huge swathe of northeast Japan was battered by torrential rain, with up to 60 centimetres (two feet) falling in some places.

"I've never seen the Kinugawa river burst its banks," 63-year-old Joso resident Akira Yoshihara told AFP.

Rescue workers transport evacuees in a rubber boat through floodwaters at 

Oyama in Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo on September 10, 2015 (AFP 

Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

"My house is on higher ground but I'm worried the water may reach it tonight."

The floods brought confusion, and several people are reportedly missing -- including one in Joso -- but authorities said they were unable to confirm the total number unaccounted for.

By early evening, police, firefighters and troops had rescued at least 260 people from houses in Joso City and surrounding areas, Jiji Press news agency said.

But an estimated 200 people were still trapped in their homes or other buildings, including a day care centre and a seniors' home, Jiji said.

Joso is about 60 kilometres (37 miles) outside Tokyo, which has also been hit by localised flooding.

The rains came in the wake of Typhoon Etau, which smashed through Japan on Wednesday, bringing strong winds and causing travel chaos.

Flooding complicated a contaminated water problem at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, where the site's drainage pumps were overwhelmed, sending radiation-tainted water into the ocean, a spokesman for operator Tokyo Electric Power said.

Floodwaters from the Kinugawa River flow into a residential area of Joso, Ibaraki 

Prefecture, on September 10, 2015 (AFP Photo)

"This is a scale of downpour that we have not experienced before," forecaster Takuya Deshimaru told an emergency press conference.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the government was on high alert, and vowed to put the "highest priority" on saving people's lives.

Two men were missing in Nikko, a city known for its historic shrines, after possibly being buried by landslides, public broadcaster NHK said.

Damage 'extensive'

Two other men in Nikko were rescued after being swept into a drainage gutter, but one was unconscious, the broadcaster said.

Forecasters from the Japan Meteorological Agency had issued special warnings urging vigilance against mudslides and flooding in Joso and other parts of Ibaraki prefecture, with 20,000 people told to seek shelter.

In neighbouring Tochigi, authorities ordered more than 90,000 people to evacuate, while another 116,000 were advised to leave their homes, public broadcaster NHK said.

People walk through floodwaters during 

evacuation at Oyama in Tochigi prefecture, 

north of Tokyo on September 10, 2015 

(AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

"We know the damage is extensive and affected wide areas," an Ibaraki official told AFP.

In Tochigi's Kanuma city, an official said rescuers were searching for a missing person believed to be buried in mudslides.

NHK reported it was a woman in her 60s buried after mudslides destroyed houses.

Etau, which smashed into Japan on Wednesday, moved out into the Sea of Japan (East Sea) by the end of the day, but a wall of rain continued to lash the country.

More than a dozen people were injured, including a 77-year-old woman who broke her leg after falling in strong winds, local reports said.

Japan is no stranger to natural disasters, and is frequently rocked by typhoons.

However, nothing in recent memory has compared with the tsunami of 2011, when more than 18,000 people were killed.

Related Article:

Japan ends nuclear shutdown sparked by Fukushima crisis