From the Eagle Watch #114 March 13, 2011 These two articles describes the huge humanitarian crisis unfolding in Japan. Entire towns have been wiped out. It is apparent that Japanese authorities are trying to play down the dangers of radiation at the plants where the situation is still out of control. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/radiation-levels-fall-blast-japan-nuke-plant-risk-20110312-052651-285.html ..Quake-tsunami death toll surpasses 10K as Japan struggles to avoid meltdown, feed survivors By Jay Alabaster,Todd Pitman, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press 52 minutes ago ....SENDAI, Japan - People across a devastated swath of Japan suffered for a third day Sunday without water, electricity and proper food, as the country grappled with the enormity of a massive earthquake and tsunami that left more than 10,000 people dead in one area alone. Japan's prime minister called the crisis the most severe challenge the nation has faced since World War II, as the grim situation worsened. Friday's disasters damaged a series of nuclear reactors, potentially sending one through a partial meltdown and adding radiation contamination to the fears of an unsettled public. Temperatures began sinking toward freezing, compounding the misery of survivors along hundreds of miles (kilometres) of the northeastern coast battered by the tsunami that smashed inland with breathtaking fury. Rescuers pulled bodies from mud-covered jumbles of wrecked houses, shattered tree trunks, twisted cars and tangled power lines while survivors examined the ruined remains. In Rikusentakata, a port city of over 20,000 virtually wiped out by the tsunami, Etsuko Koyama escaped the water rushing through the third flood of her home but lost her grip on her daughter's hand and has not found her. "I haven't given up hope yet," Koyama told public broadcaster NHK, wiping tears from her eyes. "I saved myself, but I couldn't save my daughter." To the south, in Miyagi prefecture, or state, the police chief told a gathering of disaster relief officials that his estimate for deaths was more than 10,000, police spokesman Go Sugawara told The Associated Press. Miyagi has a population of 2.3 million and is one of the three prefectures hardest hit in Friday's disaster. Fewer than 400 people have officially been confirmed as dead in Miyagi. According to officials, more than 1,400 people were killed — including 200 people whose bodies were found Sunday along the coast — and more than 1,000 were missing in the disasters. Another 1,700 were injured. Japanese officials raised their estimate Sunday of the quake's magnitude to 9.0, a notch above the U.S. Geological Survey's reading of 8.9. Either way, it was the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan, which lies on a seismically active arc. A volcano on the southern island of Kyushu — hundreds of miles (kilometres) from the quake' epicenter — also resumed spewing ash and rock Sunday after a couple of quiet weeks, Japan's weather agency said. For Japan, one of the world's leading economies with ultramodern infrastructure, the disasters plunged ordinary life into nearly unimaginable deprivation. Hundreds of thousands of hungry survivors huddled in darkened emergency centres that were cut off from rescuers, aid and electricity. At least 1.4 million households had gone without water since the quake struck and some 1.9 million households were without electricity. While the government doubled the number of soldiers deployed in the aid effort to 100,000 and sent 120,000 blankets, 120,000 bottles of water and 29,000 gallons (110,000 litres) of gasoline plus food to the affected areas, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said electricity would take days to restore. In the meantime, he said, electricity would be rationed with rolling blackouts to several cities, including Tokyo. "This is Japan's most severe crisis since the war ended 65 years ago," Kan told reporters, adding that Japan's future would be decided by its response. In a rare piece of good news, the Defence Ministry said a military vessel on Sunday rescued a 60-year-old man floating off the coast of Fukushima on the roof of his house after he and his wife were swept away in the tsunami. He was in good condition. His wife did not survive. A young man described what ran through his mind before he escaped in a separate rescue. "I thought to myself, ah, this is how I will die," Tatsuro Ishikawa, his face bruised and cut, told NHK as he sat in striped hospital pyjamas. Dozens of countries have offered assistance. Two U.S. aircraft carrier groups were off Japan's coast and ready to provide assistance. Helicopters were flying from one of the carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan, delivering food and water in Miyagi. Two other U.S. rescue teams of 72 personnel each and rescue dogs arrived Sunday, as did a five-dog team from Singapore. Still, large areas of the countryside remained surrounded by water and unreachable. Fuel stations were closed, though at some, cars waited in lines hundreds of vehicles long. The United States and a several countries in Europe urged their citizens to avoid travel to Japan. France took the added step of suggesting people leave Tokyo in case radiation reached the city. Community after community traced the vast extent of the devastation. In the town of Minamisanrikucho, 10,000 people — nearly two-thirds of the population — have not been heard from since the tsunami wiped it out, a government spokesman said. NHK showed only a couple of concrete structures still standing, and the bottom three floors of those buildings gutted. One of the few standing was a hospital, and a worker told NHK that hospital staff rescued about a third of the patients in the facility. In the town of Iwaki, there was no electricity, stores were closed and residents left as food and fuel supplies dwindled. Local police took in about 90 people and gave them blankets and rice balls, but there was no sign of government or military aid trucks. At a large refinery on the outskirts of the hard-hit port city of Sendai, 100-foot (30-meter) -high bright orange flames rose in the air, spitting out dark plumes of smoke. The facility has been burning since Friday. The fire's roar could be heard from afar. Smoke burned the eyes and throat, and a gaseous stench hung in the air. In Sendai, as night fell and temperatures dropped to freezing, people who had slept in underpasses or offices the past two nights gathered for warmth in community centres, schools and City Hall. In the small town of Tagajo, also near Sendai, dazed residents during the day roamed streets cluttered with smashed cars, broken homes and twisted metal. Residents said the water surged in and quickly rose higher than the first floor of buildings. At Sengen General Hospital, the staff worked feverishly to haul bedridden patients up the stairs one at a time. With the halls now dark, those who can leave have gone to the local community centre. "There is still no water or power, and we've got some very sick people in here," said hospital official Ikuro Matsumoto. In Sendai, firefighters with wooden picks dug through a devastated neighbourhood. One of them yelled: "A corpse." Inside a house, he had found the body of a grey-haired woman under a blanket. A few minutes later, the firefighters spotted another — that of a man in black fleece jacket and pants, crumpled in a partial fetal position at the bottom of a wooden stairwell. From outside, while the top of the house seemed almost untouched, the first floor where the body was had been inundated. A minivan lay embedded in one outer wall, which had been ripped away, pulverized beside a mangled bicycle. The man's neighbour, 24-year-old Ayumi Osuga, dug through the remains of her own house, her white mittens covered by dark mud. Osuga said she had been practicing origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into figures, with her three children when the quake stuck. She recalled her husband's shouted warning from outside: "'GET OUT OF THERE NOW!'" She gathered her children — aged 2 to 6 — and fled in her car to higher ground with her husband. They spent the night in a hilltop home belonging to her husband's family about 12 miles (20 kilometres) away. "My family, my children. We are lucky to be alive," she said. "I have come to realize what is important in life," Osuga said, nervously flicking ashes from a cigarette onto the rubble at her feet as a giant column of black smoke billowed in the distance. ___ Todd Pitman reported from Sendai. Associated Press writers Eric Talmadge and Kelly Olsen in Koriyama and Malcolm J. Foster, Mari Yamaguchi, Tomoko A. Hosaka and Shino Yuasa in Tokyo contributed to this report. ... .Japan fights to avert nuclear meltdown after quake By Taiga Uranaka and Ki Joon Kwon | Reuters Sun, 13 Mar, 2011 1:06 PM EDT .........Related Content. ...People walk along a flooded street in Ishimaki City, Miyagi Prefecture in northern … ..Workers carry bodies from a damaged home for the elderly after an earthquake and … Expert sees "good news" in Japan nuclear fight 2 hours 47 minutes ago Snapshot: Developments after major Japan earthquake 1 hour 55 minutes ago ....FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - Japan struggled on Monday to avert a nuclear disaster and care for millions of people without power or water, three days after an earthquake and tsunami killed an estimated 10,000 people or more in the nation's darkest hour since World War Two. The world's third-largest economy opens for business later on Monday, a badly wounded nation that has seen whole villages and towns wiped off the map by a wall of water, leaving in its wake an international humanitarian effort of epic proportion. A grim-faced Prime Minister Naoto Kan described the crisis at Japan's worst since 1945, as officials confirmed that three nuclear reactors were at risk of overheating, raising fears of an uncontrolled radiation leak. "The earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear incident have been the biggest crisis Japan has encountered in the 65 years since the end of World War II," Kan told a news conference. "We're under scrutiny on whether we, the Japanese people, can overcome this crisis." As he spoke, officials worked desperately to stop fuel rods in the damaged reactors from overheating. If they fail, the containers that house the core could melt, or even explode, releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. The most urgent crisis centers on the Fukushima Daiichi complex, where all three reactors are threatening to overheat, and where authorities say they have been forced to release radioactive steam into the air to relieve reactor pressure. The complex, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, was rocked by an explosion on Saturday, which blew the roof off a reactor building. The government did not rule out further blasts there but said this would not necessarily damage the reactor vessels. Authorities have poured sea water in all three of the complex's reactor to cool them down. FEARS OVER OTHER REACTORS The complex, run by Tokyo Electric Power Co, is the biggest nuclear concern but not the only one: on Monday, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Japanese authorities had notified it of an emergency at another plant further north, at Onagawa. But Japan's nuclear safety agency denied problems at the Onagawa plant, run by Tohoku Electric Power Co, noting that radioactive releases from the Fukushima Daiichi complex had been detected at Onagawa, but that these were within safe levels at a tiny fraction of the radiation received in an x-ray. Shortly later, a cooling-system problem was reported at another nuclear plant closer to Tokyo, in Ibaraki prefecture. Fukushima's No. 1 reactor, where the roof was ripped off, is 40 years old and was originally set to go out of commission in February but had its operating license extended by 10 years. Prime Minister Kan said the crisis was not another Chernobyl, referring to the nuclear disaster of 1986 in Soviet Ukraine. "Radiation has been released in the air, but there are no reports that a large amount was released," Jiji news agency quoted him as saying. "This is fundamentally different from the Chernobyl accident." Nevertheless, France recommended its citizens leave the Tokyo region, citing the risk of further earthquakes and uncertainty about the nuclear plants. Broadcaster NHK, quoting a police official, said more than 10,000 people may have been killed as the wall of water triggered by Friday's 8.9-magnitude quake surged across the coastline, reducing whole towns to rubble. Almost 2 million households were without power in the freezing north, the government said. There were about 1.4 million without running water. Kyodo news agency said about 300,000 people were evacuated nationwide. Authorities have set up a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and a 10 km (6 miles) zone around another nuclear facility close by. The nuclear accident, the worst since Chernobyl, sparked criticism that authorities were ill-prepared for such a massive quake and the threat that could pose to the country's nuclear power industry. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said there might have been a partial meltdown of the fuel rods at the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima. Engineers were pumping in seawater, trying to prevent the same happening at the No. 3 reactor, he said in apparent acknowledgement they had moved too slowly on Saturday. "Unlike the No.1 reactor, we ventilated and injected water at an early stage," Edano told a news briefing. The No. 3 reactor uses a mixed-oxide fuel which contains plutonium, but plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it did not present unusual problems. TEPCO said radiation levels around the Fukushima Daiichi plant had risen above the safety limit but that it did not mean an "immediate threat" to human health. The wind over the plant would continue blowing from the south, which could affect residents north of the facility, an official at Japan's Meteorological Agency said. SEARCH FOR THE MISSING Kan said food, water and other necessities such as blankets were being delivered by vehicles but because of damage to roads, authorities were considering air and sea transport. He also said the government was preparing to double the number of troops mobilized to 100,000. Thousands spent another freezing night huddled in blankets over heaters in emergency shelters along the northeastern coast, a scene of devastation after the quake sent a 10-meter (33-foot) wave surging through towns and cities in the Miyagi region, including its main coastal city of Sendai. A Japanese official said 22 people have been confirmed to have suffered radiation contamination and up to 190 may have been exposed. Workers in protective clothing used handheld scanners to check people arriving at evacuation centers. GOVERNMENT CRITICISED The government, in power less than two years and which had already been struggling to push policy through a deeply divided parliament, came under criticism for its handling of the disaster. "Crisis management is incoherent," blared a headline in the Asahi newspaper, saying information and instructions to expand the evacuation area around the troubled plant were too slow. There has been a proposal of an extra budget to help pay for the huge cost of recovery. The Bank of Japan is expected to pledge on Monday to supply as much money as needed to prevent the disaster from destabilizing markets and its banking system. It is also expected to signal its readiness to ease monetary policy further if the damage from the worst quake since records began in Japan 140 years ago threatens a fragile economic recovery. The earthquake was the fifth most powerful to hit the world in the past century. It surpassed the Great Kanto quake of September 1, 1923, which had a magnitude of 7.9 and killed more than 140,000 people in the Tokyo area. The 1995 Kobe quake killed 6,000 and caused $100 billion in damage, the most expensive natural disaster in history. Economic damage from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was estimated at about $10 billion. (Additional reporting by Risa Maeda and Leika Kihara in Tokyo and Chris Meyers and Kim Kyung-hoon in Sendai; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by John Chalmers) ____________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: eaglewatch@npogroups.org To be removed from the list, send any message to: eaglewatch-unsubscribe@npogroups.org For all list information and functions, see: http://npogroups.org/lists/info/eaglewatch
