More Than 100 Cars Burn at Storage Site During Typhoon Jebi

Japanese media reports at least 7 deaths during the storm and over 700 people injured, but the official tally is still due. The same goes for the damage done to buildings, the road infrastructure and vehicles, but we can get an idea of how bad it was from footage and photos making the rounds online.

To put it mildly, it was bad: Jebi hit hard. Buildings were torn apart or partially demolished, entire areas flooded, cities evacuated, vessels brought onto mainland and made to crash, and cars overturned after being carried away. Strong gusts of wind took trucks and vans and flipped them over, and piled cars in parking areas, totaling them.

At one storage site on a man-made island in the Nishinomiya city, the Hyogo Prefecture, a huge blaze burned through at least 100 cars. The fire followed a flood: when the water retreated, electric cables short-circuited and set the vehicles on site on fire, NHK reports.

“Police were notified of the blaze at a used car lot shortly before 3 PM on Tuesday. Details of the fire were not immediately available,” the publication notes. “Video taken by an NHK helicopter shows flames and black smoke rising from cars parked at the site. Firefighters were positioned on the coast, and boats were seen spraying water from the sea.”

You can see a video of the blaze at the bottom of the page. Firefighters were eventually able to put it out.

As of the time of writing, Jebi has been downgraded to a tropical storm and is heading north of the country, back to sea.