Tokyo Flood Control

Bloomberg News (August 14) -- To control potential flooding as typhoons swamp subways, Tokyo government is spending 24.5 billion yen ($240 million) project to build a giant subterranean reservoir -- the city’s second of three -- to handle flood waters from the Furukawa river that winds through the area. “We decided the best approach was to go underground.” “Japan has no choice,” Marcelo H. Garcia, director of the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a phone interview. “With the lack of space they have, they have to come up with some ingenious way of doing this.”