Kanagawa, Japan
Saturday is kind of a haze for me to recall now. I remember that we were all just happy that we'd survived a major disaster and thought the worst was over. Aftershocks still rumbled through the apartment but they didn't cause any disruption. We kept the helmets, torch and radio close at hand. I heard about the reactor at Fukushima and imagined pretty much right away that it would cause problems, either by igniting panic in Tokyo, or else if the authorities were unable to get it under control soon that the radiation levels may get out of hand. I remember thinking that the worst case scenario could be another Chernobyl, with everyone in Tokyo either ordered to evacuate, causing a choke up on the trains, buses and roads out of the city, or stay indoors where we'd also be trapped, and the only way to escape such a situation would be to pre-empt it. I also pretty much decided straight away that the government would probably play down the disaster to avoid either panic or loss of face, and so I assumed that the situation was always slightly worse than they said it was. This had happened many times before, with NOVA for example, or FOI, the electronics company I taught English at, both pretending everything was peachy until it was far far too late and everything went pear-shaped. Plus there was always a time lag between when something harmful reaches the public and the government notices it and warns the public about it. I wanted to stay ahead of this time lag.
Unfortunately, due to watching too much internet the night before and not getting enough sleep, I had a bit of a headache and decided to take it easy for the day. I wasn't really in the mood for evasive action.
But I couldn't help be drawn back to watching things develop on the net. BBC was running a 24 hour news page on the strings of disasters, complete with video and twitter updates, but watching earthquake devastation on the news from an external viewpoint while actually still feeling aftershocks and still being inside the situation created a strong feeling of nausea and vertigo.
Slept with the family again, but due to my son still waking up every 90 minutes for milk didn't get much rest.
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| The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Reactor 1 to 4 from right to left. |
Unbeknownst to us a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off Fukushima Unit 1. The evacuation zone was extended to 20km around the plant and sea water was being used for emergency cooling, and the release of iodine 131 from a damaged reactor core led Japanese officials to distribute iodine pills to people living around the plant to avoid thyroid absorption.
(Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#/media/File:Fukushima_I_by_Digital_Globe.jpg under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
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