A month after a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck Ishikawa Prefecture’s Noto Peninsula on New Year’s Day, myriad challenges remain in the recovery effort, with about 14,000 people still living at evacuation shelters as officials race to repair infrastructure in the region.
In the quake, more than 46,000 houses in the prefecture were severely damaged or destroyed. A large portion of the population was also cut off from water supplies.
For some areas, restoration may take months. Around 40,000 households in a total of eight cities and towns in Ishikawa are still without water, impacting cooking, toilets, showers and laundry.
A major problem when water is cut off is not being able to flush toilets, which can cause hygiene issues at houses, evacuation shelters and schools. Mobile bathroom cars and portable toilets have been set up instead.
Some people are traveling by car to bathe at the nearest public bathhouse or hot spring. Residents have also been lining up at coin laundries outside of their cities and towns.
Hideko Ichikawa, 78, a resident of the city of Nanao, lines up for water handed out from a tanker truck every day and goes to neighboring Toyama Prefecture to do laundry.
“What we need is water. I’ve never felt so grateful for being able to use water freely,” Ichikawa told Jiji Press.
One reason for the long-term water outage is that many of the pipes in the affected areas are aging.
“Because construction costs for fixing older pipes and making them quake-proof are reflected in utility bills, (construction) had been delayed, causing the damage to be extensive,” Ishikawa Gov. Hiroshi Hase said on Saturday. Many water purification plants were damaged in the quake, too, he added.
Efforts to repair water pipes are ongoing across the prefecture. A majority of municipalities will have water access temporarily restored by the end of March, but limited areas in the cities of Suzu and Nanao may not see water return until after April.
Efforts to restore power to quake-hit areas have gone more smoothly. While around 40,000 households saw outages right after the earthquake, the figure has fallen to about 2,400 across six municipalities, with a majority in the cities of Wajima and Suzu, according to Hokuriku Electric Power.
Housing
As many residents remain in evacuation shelters, authorities are encouraging evacuees to move to higher quality facilities for temporary housing, including hotels and inns, to prevent impacts to their health.
To offer another option for long-term housing, about 1,248 makeshift dwellings are being built in Ishikawa Prefecture, with 18 finished as of Wednesday in Wajima. The prefecture has also secured the use of 13,900 existing temporary housing units for evacuees, including in nearby prefectures.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in mid-January that around 23,700 public housing units and rental housing sites have been secured in four prefectures in the Hokuriku region.
Roads and transportation
One concern following the January earthquake was the limited access to the cities and towns at the tip of the Noto Peninsula, posing challenges to efforts to deliver supplies and repair roadways.
As of Wednesday, there were prefectural road closures at 64 locations on 26 roadways, compared to 89 locations on 42 roads two days after the quake.
The prefecture has said that ongoing seismic activity has prompted caution when conducting operations amid the risk of landslides, adding that even after restoration, roadways may be buried again by debris. Winter weather has added to the challenges, as snow removal has had to be prioritized, leading to frequent interruptions.
Because of the limited access to the Noto Peninsula, construction can only be conducted from one direction — starting from the base of the peninsula — unlike the normal approach in which construction is typically conducted from both directions.
Public transportation services are also slowly beginning to resume operations. Noto Satoyama Airport, which had suspended operations since the earthquake, opened up to commercial flights on Saturday, with the first flight from Haneda Airport touching down.
The Nanao Line, connecting Nanao and Wakura Onsen stations, is slated to resume services on Feb. 15, with the portion between Noto Nakajima and Anamizu stations set to be opened in mid-April.
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