2006 Volume 4 Pages 50-61
Many heavy rainfall disasters happened in Japan on 2003 and 2004. Aspects and lessons from disasters were reported by newspaper and other medias. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of information of these heavy rainfall disasters for municipality officer for disaster prevention based on mail questionnaire survey. Questionnaires were sent to 737 municipalities in November 2004, as a result the survey has produced responses from 364 municipalities. We may say that the interest in heavy rainfall disaster for municipality disaster prevention officers was raised by frequency of heavy rainfall disasters. For instance, 35% of respondents answered "The frequency of browsing of the Yahoo! Weather, the most popular meteorological information site, was increased after the heavy rainfall disasters in 2004". Then the percentage of respondents of "An evacuation order of heavy rainfall disaster may be announced from our office" was increased 10%. However, the interest was not connected with concrete measures. The main reasons are as follows: (1) Before the disasters, 39% of municipalities didn't considered inundation by flood on the occasion of decision about location of public shelters, after the disasters, municipalities which revised the location of shelter were only 12% of those. (2) The heavy rainfall disaster on Minamata city in July 2003 happened midnight of holiday. Minamata city office took many lessons from the disaster, and these lessons were reported by major medias severely. Minamata city improved several problems based on the lesson, however there were few municipalities which did the similar improvement. 15% of respondent had experience of systematic training course about disaster prevention. On the other hand, 21% of respondent were not educated about disaster prevention. There is a limit in the measure for disaster prevention by local municipality individually. It is important that the systematization based on lessons of disasters by national government.
