Floods and landslides triggered by torrential rains this week in Yamaguchi Prefecture have resulted in the deaths or disappearances of 17 people.

All the victims were elderly. Seven of them were residents of a nursing home for the elderly in a mountainous area in the city of Hofu. This kind of disaster can happen in many parts of Japan. The central and local governments should examine in detail what happened in Yamaguchi Prefecture and work out future preventive measures.

The nursing home was in a location designated by the prefectural government in March 2008 as requiring that precautions be taken against a possible landslide. In June 2009, the prefectural government told local residents about a plan to build a sand-trap dam in a mountain behind the nursing home. If there had been such a dam, it might have minimized the damage.

There is a theory that, although local governments provide subsidies for the construction of nursing homes, many nursing home management firms choose to build facilities in mountainous areas where land prices are cheep.

Hofu's city hall is said to have not issued an evacuation order to the nursing home until five hours after it received a report that sand and mud was flowing into the first floor of the two-story home. Local governments should ensure a quicker flow of information, and the central government should strengthen its capabilities in meteorological observation and prediction.

According to the land and infrastructure ministry, some 108,000 locations nationwide are designated as requiring precautions against landslides, including some 42,500 spots where housing development is restricted. There are also about 14,000 nursing homes for the elderly and hospitals that would need help during an evacuation. Protective measures, including sand-trap dam construction, have been taken for only some 4,000 of them. The Hofu nursing home was not among these.

Despite an apparent shortage of funds for such measures, the central government must stay focused on its goal, announced in 2007, of reducing deaths from natural disasters to zero.