Communities in Japan drafting their own disaster plans

Local communities across Japan are increasingly adopting new approaches to disaster risks without waiting for central authorities to show them what to do.

The measures include neighborhood tsunami risk maps, locally planned evacuation routes and community-level disaster drills.

Representatives on Saturday spoke of their efforts to delegates on the sidelines of the U.N. World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction underway in Sendai.

Residents of the Handa district in Kori, Fukushima Prefecture, said they are working on a disaster management program based on lessons learned from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and subsequent crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

The program will include a map of evacuation centers and routes residents should take, and a manual on how to check that residents are safe. They said they are designing the program so it will be easy to understand for elderly people, who account for about one-third of the local population.

Residents of the Miki district in Kaga, Ishikawa Prefecture, said they are working on a tsunami hazard map in cooperation with an adjacent district in Fukui Prefecture.

The central government is encouraging local communities to step up their own disaster management activities. The Cabinet Office has designated 15 model communities across the country.

Presentations were made by 12 of the model districts, including the Ando district in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, which was hit hard by the 2011 tsunami.

But one resident of Handa warned that it is not enough to draft community-based disaster management plans: What is difficult is to keep them updated over the years as the people in charge come and go.