AP Enterprise: Nuke evacuation fatal for old, sick

Source: AP


By ERIC TALMADGE and MARI YAMAGUCHI

MINAMI-SOMA, Japan (AP) - The doctors and nurses at Futaba Hospital pleaded for help as a radioactive plume wafted over their hospital. They had been ordered out but had no vehicles to evacuate the hundreds of patients in their care. After two days of waiting in the cold with no electricity, help finally came.

Nearly two dozen patients died in the chaotic, daylong odyssey that followed.

Japan's government says only one person, an overworked employee at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, died as a result of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. But one year later, details from a new report and interviews with local authorities show many more perished because of bad planning and miscommunication between government agencies.

In fact, if the calamities that unfolded on March 11, 2011, were to be repeated today, hundreds of thousands of lives would still be at risk, according to mayors, hospital administrators and disaster response officials interviewed by The Associated Press. They say little has been done to fix systemic planning shortfalls and communication problems between government agencies that compounded that day's horrors.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20120310/D9TDE4I81.html

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In this March 19, 2011, an elderly evacuee is carried in on a wheelchair to an evacuation center in Yokohama, near Tokyo, from the Fukujuen home for the eldery, in Minami Soma, a city partially in the 12-miles (20-kilometer) no-go zone from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The home's 96 residents were evacuated to Yokohama as they ran out of medicine and faced starvation, according to the home's director, Masahiro Sakashita. One of them also died on the bus, and two others fell seriously ill. (AP Photo/Kyodo News, File) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT, NO LICENSING IN CHINA, HONG KONG, JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA AND FRANCE