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Congestion on the Kanetsu Highway, which connects Tokyo and Niigata prefectures, began to form Thursday morning when a car got stuck on a deep hill in the middle of the highway. The incident began to stop traffic, reports the country’s highway maintenance company Nippon Expressway Company (NEXCO).
A heavy snowstorm hit central and northern Japan on Thursday morning. It disrupted communications and caused power outages in some areas.
Traffic on the highway stopped for the rest of the day. Congestion peaked Thursday night; at the time, its length was 15 miles, CNN told NEXCO. The traffic jam also continued on Friday, with lanes of traffic that continued on the Tokyo side eventually lost, but traffic in the lanes leading to the capital remained stagnant. About a thousand cars were still stuck on the road Friday afternoon.
Photos from the road show long lines of stopped cars, many of them wearing snow hats, there are also piles of snow around them, and the snowy fields continue to spread.
Congestion on the Kanetsu Highway
On Thursday he felt some relief when emergency services began distributing rice dumplings, bread, cookies, sandwiches, as well as distributing 600 bottles of water and thousands of gallons of gasoline and diesel.
However, the drivers had been stuck in the cold for many hours, so such assistance was not enough.
“The blizzard was extremely severe. Over time, it just buried the cars. I was very scared. I ate and drank everything I just had. To get drinking water, I had to melt the snow in a plastic bottle,” said a driver anonymous to NHK, a Japanese public broadcaster.
A woman in her 40s trapped in a traffic jam and a man in her 60s were taken to hospital on Thursday with respiratory problems and nausea, said Tsuyoshi Watanabe, an official with the Niigata Prefectural Crisis Management Service. No serious or fatal disasters have yet been reported.
Congestion on the Kanetsu Highway
Watanabe added that the prefecture had asked to send a Japanese self-defense force into the congestion to distribute food, water, fuel and portable toilets to people still trapped on Friday, as well as to help clear the snow.
NEXCO warns drivers on social media and radio about the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning in such cases.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with ministers to discuss the problem of a severe snowstorm. Local authorities are called upon to mobilize and restore service and assist the victims.
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