Fuyuko Yoshimoto was among the many residents in Mobara, Chiba Prefecture, still removing mud-covered items from flooded homes on Oct. 28 and adding to the mountains of waste building up in the city.

Garbage, including furniture, electric appliances and other household items made unusable in the flooding, has filled disposal sites and lined streets in this city of 89,000, which has been hit by three typhoons since last month.

Clearing the waste in Mobara and other hard-hit areas of eastern Japan is nowhere in sight. Few municipalities were prepared for the sheer amount of waste produced by the multiple deluges, despite a government decree.

“I have no idea when they will collect them,” Yoshimoto, 38, said, pointing to the mud-covered articles placed outside her house for disposal. “I have no choice but to put them outside because mud is all over in my home.”

Her house suffered little damage when Typhoon No. 15 and No. 19 struck. But heavy rain caused by Typhoon No. 21 left her home inundated about 50 centimeters above floor level.

It took her family three days to remove the drenched drawers, a piano and clothes from their house.

Additional floodwater from Typhoon No. 21 hit a broader area of the city on Oct. 25, when waste from the previous typhoons had already filled municipal waste disposal facilities.

The city confirmed that 717 houses were flooded, but that number is expected to rise in the coming days.

City authorities set up a provisional disposal site on Oct. 27 for disaster-related waste from households. By the following afternoon, the garbage was already piled up to a height of about 3 meters.

Officials plan to set up two more temporary disposal sites, but they acknowledged that they may not be enough.

The city government has also commissioned private-sector contractors to collect waste placed outside homes to help people who cannot take their garbage to disposal sites because of their advanced age or other physical reasons.

“The damage from the disaster was far beyond the extent that we had expected,” a Mobara city official said. “I cannot imagine the amount of waste we’ll see in the end.”

The Mobara government estimates that it will take at least a month to collect all the waste because of the expansive range of inundation.

But disposing of the collected waste will be even more time-consuming.

The work to dispose of waste from flooding caused by torrential rains in western Japan in July last year is expected to be completed in July 2020.

In that disaster, around 28,000 houses were flooded, generating about 2 million tons of waste.

This year’s storms in eastern Japan swamped 70,000 houses. In particular, Typhoon No. 19 on Oct. 12 and 13 caused many rivers to burst their banks.

The Environment Ministry forecasts the volume of waste from the latest disasters will exceed that of last year’s deluge in western Japan.

When the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami ravaged the northeastern Tohoku region in 2011, recovery efforts were hampered because some local authorities could not swiftly set up disposal sites.

The 2011 disaster produced more than 30 million tons of waste, including deposits left by the tsunami.

Based on that lesson, the Environment Ministry, under order by decree, required local governments across Japan to have plans in place to cope with waste from future disasters. They were told to estimate the volume of waste, decide on locations for disposal, and establish sorting methods.

But an Asahi Shimbun inquiry showed that only 232, or 33 percent, of local governments in Tokyo and 16 prefectures affected by the recent series of typhoons had such plans in place after April 2018.

The Environment Ministry’s nationwide survey reflected a similar trend, finding that less than 30 percent of local governments had waste disposal plans for natural disasters.

“There is a shortage of civil servants who are capable of devising plans with expertise in the matter,” a ministry official said, citing the reason for the low percentage.

Marumori, a town in Miyagi Prefecture that was hard hit by the recent storms and had no waste plan in place, scrambled to set up four temporary disposal sites. Town officials soon had to look for additional places because some of the sites were quickly filled with waste.

The Nagano city government had drawn up waste plans, but some places that were supposed to have been used as disposal sites were unusable because they were flooded.

(Susumu Imaizumi contributed reporting to this article.)