Health Literacy and Disaster Preparedness: The Role of Hazard Map Awareness among Individuals with Physical Disabilities

disaster prevention plans are now required to include information for helping residents to evacuate quickly and safely, such as means of delivering flood forecast information and evacuation sites, by each inundation risk area.Municipal governments are also required to keep their residents informed of such information.For these reasons, flood hazard maps were positioned as a means to inform residents of information on flood risks and evacuation.Along with the partial amendment of the Flood Fighting Act, "Flood Hazard Mapping Manual" was also amended, and consequently flood hazard maps have been prepared and disclosed by 301 municipalities across Japan as of the end of fiscal year 2003.However, the progress is not necessarily satisfactory.In 2004, a series of downpour that occurred in many places across Japan revealed several problems to be solved.To address such issues, it was decided to amend the Flood Fighting Act so that the local capability of preventing disasters will be improved.The amendment was promulgated in May 2, 2005, and went into effect in July 1 of the same year.By this amendment, municipal governments are now required to designate inundation risk areas not only along large rivers for which flood forecasting is conducted but along also major smalland medium-sized rivers.In addition, the municipal governments are required to keep their residents informed of means of delivering information on flood forecasts and evacuation sites by distributing flood hazard maps that contain such information.The purpose here is to provide residents with sufficient information on disaster prevention so as to help them act appropriately at the occurrence of disaster.To this end, flood hazard mapping is now considered to be even more important than ever.This "Flood Hazard Mapping Manual" was prepared as a technical reference to provide practical guidelines in flood hazard mapping, based on the amended Flood Fighting Act.I hope this manual is helpful for all concerned to successfully prepare and disclose flood hazard maps.