Deciding to Survive - Finding the courage to save my life when disaster struck

On September 8, 2023, as typhoon No. 13 was making its way through the Pacific coast, Chiba Prefecture was hit by torrential rains due to the linear precipitation zone. Even though I had learned from the morning weather forecast that the rain would stop in the evening and the typhoon would turn into a tropical storm, I was careless and I did something I should never have done.

I usually drive through the back roads, so I drove through the woods and rice paddies to Marugame Udon in Misato-dai, Narita, to have kitsune udon for lunch. The restaurant was empty, partly because the typhoon was passing through. The rain was lighter, but the roads were quiet. There were almost no cars waiting at the traffic lights, so I could easily drive around. I decided to drive on the back roads that run through the rice paddies on my way back to the office. As I drove about 200 meters from the prefectural road to a narrow path between rice paddies, I noticed that there was quite a lot of water under the railway bridge of the JR Narita Line. For a moment, I thought, “Oh no, this is bad,” but then I saw a car driving through the water, and I thought to myself, “Surely my BMW will make it.” That was the beginning of the end of my car.

As I drove about 20 meters through the water, the rain suddenly started pouring down heavier and the water level rose. As soon as I said to myself, “This is not good, I gotta get out of here now,” the engine suddenly stopped. “Oh my God!” I panicked and tried to start the engine several times and the dashboard panel lit up, but then the engine wouldn’t start! “Noooo!” When I looked around, I saw that I was in the middle of the road between the rice paddies, so no one was around. Before I could think about what to do next, the water level was rising quickly as the rain heavily poured.

This was my first time getting stuck in the water! The place was becoming like a lake and I immediately thought that the doors would not open in the water due to the water pressure. That meant the first and the most important thing I needed to do was to open the door and get ready to escape. I tried to open the door in desperation, but fortunately, I was able to open it easily. What scared me was that the water level had already reached the edge of the door. If the water level had risen all at once, it would have been more difficult to survive. I had no time! I had no choice but to get ready to swim in the water with all of my clothes on. The time had come to make a decision.

Before I got out of the front seat and got soaking wet, I decided to send out an SOS message to my colleagues in the office. I wanted to at least tell them where I was and call for help. Considering that cell phones are vulnerable to water and might stop functioning when wet, this was the only time I could contact them. I then sent a map of my location via LINE and asked for help. I also made a phone call, but I don’t know what on earth was going on since the board members were not answering the phone even though the call was from the chairman of the board. I was really upset with the voicemail system in an emergency situation. Then, in response to my SOS call on LINE, one of the directors returned a message saying that he had forwarded the call to the personnel department. Did he not understand the importance of the situation and the importance of crisis management? Forwarding? It felt as if I was told that he had told the personnel department to call the fire department while my house was on fire. Did they think that this was someone else’s problem? Not one person even called me. By the way, I always have three cell phones on me so I can answer any of them. I realized that in times of disaster, we need friends who can act instantly and help each other. However, I had no choice but to survive on my own!

Time to escape! I made up my mind, stuffed my essential belongings from the car into my pockets, held my laptop firmly to my chest in case it got submerged into the water, and ta-da! I braved the torrential rain and was immediately soaked. “Ah, time to bid farewell to this car! Did I really just lose you to this flood?” I had been driving this car for 10 years, so I was attached to it. Even in the torrential rain, I succeeded in capturing its majestic appearance by taking pictures with my smartphone while I still could. However, my computer was getting wet, my phone was soaking wet, and there was nowhere to find shelter away from this rain. The underpass looked like it was filled with 1 meter of water from where I stood. Oh, is this how miserable life really is? I’m standing alone in the torrential downpour, soaking wet and clutching my computer to my chest.

Then I came to my senses and looked around me and saw that the water seemed to be rising in all directions. Ohhh.... As soon as I realized that I could not just stand there, I started running as a runner who prides himself for having good legs. And although there was another flooded road on the way, it was only 40 cm deep compared to where my car was submerged, so I plunged into the water without question and kept running. I drove up to a bridge on higher ground and finally found shelter from the rain under a railway bridge that was not flooded. I was soaked all over, but fortunately it was summer. I wasn’t cold.

I breathed a sigh of relief, calmed down, and decided to try to contact everyone again. When I called everyone on the telephone or via LINE and asked why no one was coming to help, one employee who was headed this way said that he had a map but did not know how to look at it and he had gone to a different place. It must be strange for a person to be an adult and not be able to look at a map. I had no choice but to ask if someone else could come and pick me up, and one of the board members finally offered to come right away. As it turned out, that board member also went in the wrong direction and ended up sacrificing his car to the flood as well.

40 minutes after the disaster, the employee who was the first to leave the company and did not understand how to read the map finally drove by to come pick me up. I was soaking wet, but that’s life. This is what a disaster can be like. It’s when everything that can go wrong goes wrong and nothing ends well. There’s no one to help and no one there to rely on. In order to survive, you have to make your own decisions. The important thing is to make a snap decision at the moment and take action to save your life. That instantaneous decision will determine whether you live or die. For myself, I still have a lot of life left to live. Life is just too important of a thing to lose.