2023 Volume 21 Issue 2 Pages 169-179
Immediately after the occurrence of a disaster, the prefectures will assess various situations, such as the response status of municipalities in the prefecture and the extent of damage, and provide necessary support to the municipalities. One of the information reported by municipalities to prefectures is residential damage. The number of residential damages is fundamental information for disaster response operations such as emergency temporary housing, disaster waste, and certification of residential damage, so it is important to grasp this information as early as possible. However, when municipalities report the number of residential damages to prefectural governments, the speed and content of the reports may differ due to various factors. When this situation occurs, prefectures are unable to properly grasp the situation of municipalities in their prefectures, making it difficult to provide necessary assistance at the right time.
Therefore, the purpose of this study was to clarify how differences in the way municipalities grasp the situation of inundation damage caused by flooding and the way they report to prefectures manifest themselves in the data on the number of residential damages collected by prefectures. Using the East Japan Typhoon of 2019 as a case study, we conducted a time-series analysis of the number of residential damages reported by each prefectural government, and classified the behaviors in the data. In addition, we interviewed officials of four municipalities in Nagano Prefecture about their methods of collecting and reporting residential damage and problems in dealing with such damage, and examined how the situation in municipalities is expressed in data.
