applied for the first time to move vehicles stalled on Route 192 on the border between Ehime and Tokushima Prefectures. Furthermore, unifying the sharing and dissemination of snow removal conditions and other information, as well as improving the efficiency of snow removal, is being promoted, along with the establishment of measures for relaying headquarters information to the relevant organizations of road administrators.

### b. Avalanche Disaster Measures in Heavy Snowfall Regions

In japan, 21,000 areas are prone to snow avalanche and the development of avalanche prevention facilities is being promoted to protect human lives from avalanche disasters in settlements.

### c. Implementing Snow Clearing Waterways Projects

In heavy snowfall regions, in addition to securing flood control functions, water conveyance channels are being developed for rivers with abundant water volume to supply small and medium-sized rivers flowing through the city with water for snow clearing waterways.

## Column MLIT's Response to Heavy Snowfall

Vehicles stalled in various locations due to the record snowfall that occurred in the Kanto and Koshin Regions in February, 2014. These stalled vehicles disturbed the snow clearing work. While clearing snow off the roads was delayed, vehicles in other locations stalled, causing the large-scale closing of roads for several days.

The large-scale closing of roads often occurs due to the stalling of a large-sized vehicle which can be caused by the use of summer tires or not installing chains.

The MLIT is reinforcing the snow cleaning system for such an unusual amount of snowfall, as well as improving the provision of information for road users, to secure winter road traffic.

## Establishment of Unusual Snowfall Countermeasures Headquarters of MLIT

To minimize the damage due to unusual snowfall, the “Unusual Snowfall Countermeasures Headquarters of MLIT” (General manager: Ohta, Minister of MLIT) was established as a permanent organization in December 9, 2014. The Headquarters created for the first time the disaster prevention action plan (timeline) indicating the disaster prevention action to be taken against snow damage on a time series basis, and the Ministry proper, the Regional Development Bureau, and transportation service providers will act in cooperation with each other on the basis of the information, such as the weather information provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency, to minimize the damage.

## I ntensive Implementation of Snow Clearing Work Along with Early Closing of Roads

Once the stalling of vehicles occurs, the stalled vehicles block the passage of snow clearing vehicles and it takes time to remove stalled vehicles, resulting in prolonged traffic closing.

To cope with the problem, in the road sections where vehicle stalling can occur, the standby locations of road cleaning vehicles and a personnel distribution plan are determined in advance to make preparations for quick initial response.

Since 2014, efforts have been made to reduce the total time of traffic closure by closing off the traffic at an early stage and clearing snow effectively before the occurrence of a vehicle stalling rather than after its occurrence, particularly in the cases of unusual snowfall when a vehicle will likely stall.