WJ: Tepco Worker's Email Reveals Personal Struggles

An email from a Tokyo Electric Power Co. employee working at one of the Fukushima nuclear power plants gives a rare look at how employees are grappling with personal loss even while working around the clock to respond to the March 11 quake.

"My parents were washed away by the tsunami and I still don't know where they are. Normally I would rush to their house as soon as I could. But I can't even enter the area because it is under an evacuation order," says the email signed by the author, who works for the plant manager at the Fukushima Daini plant near the stricken Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power spokesman Hiro Hasegawa said the email, sent last Wednesday to a private email list and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, is "authentic." The worker didn't return emails seeking comment and couldn't be reached.

"Most of the people working at 1F and 2F live in this area, and they are all victims of the disaster," the email said. The author said that where her parents lived, "the whole town was washed away by the tsunami."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703576204576226373025523908.html

In planning their defense against a killer tsunami, the people running Japan's now-hobbled nuclear power plant dismissed important scientific evidence and all but disregarded 3,000 years of geological history, an Associated Press investigation shows.

Read more: http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/AP-IMPACT-Nuclear-plant-downplayed-tsunami-risk-1309519.php#ixzz1HpqKOo1d

TOKYO (Kyodo)--Masataka Shimizu, president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the crisis-hit Fukushima nuclear plant, fell sick March 16 and took some days off from the liaison office between the government and the utility firm, TEPCO officials said Sunday.

<snip>

A TEPCO spokesperson declined to elaborate on his health condition, but said he did not fall over or need to be hooked up to an intravenous drip.

Shimizu has not appeared in public since attending a press conference on March 13, two days after the catastrophe that wreaked havoc on northeastern and eastern Japan.


http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20110327D27JF149.htm