Japan says it's no better prepared

MINAMI-SOMA, Japan - The doctors and nurses at Futaba Hospital pleaded for help as a radioactive plume wafted overhead. 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 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.

"We have set a terrible precedent for the rest of the nation and for any town in the world where nuclear plants are located," said Katsutaka Idokawa, the mayor of Futaba, one of two towns straddled by the devastated Fukushima facility. "I see this disaster as a meltdown of Japan itself."

Akinori Kahata, a nuclear-disaster-management official at Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said the government was reviewing its contingency plans - extending the regulations to cover up to 18 miles from a nuclear plant - because of the problems with the Fukushima evacuation, particularly with hospitalized and handicapped people.

But officials in several towns around Japan where nuclear plants are located said that they are not confident their emergency plans would work any better than Fukushima's. They say it could take months and require a complete reexamination of how to approach evacuations for significant improvements to be made.

The breakdown in Japan's crisis response was most striking in the evacuation of Fukushima's sick and elderly.

According to a 400-page report released last month by the Independent Fact-Finding Committee on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident - a panel of scholars, lawyers, and industry experts - 784 patients were evacuated from six Fukushima hospitals within the 12-mile no-go area. Of 435 at Futaba Hospital and a related senior center, 21 died either in buses en route to evacuation centers, or in the centers themselves, before they could be admitted to another facility.

Jin Ishida's grandfather was one of them.

Ishida, who is in charge of crisis management in Okuma, which is next Futaba and also is host to part of the Fukushima nuclear plant, said the disaster overwhelmed local authorities.

"It was complete chaos," he said. "We were not prepared. We had no protection, no protective gear, no experts. Our communication lines were disrupted, our phone lines were clogged by a flood of incoming calls. We didn't have contingency plans for hospitals - even the firefighters didn't have a plan."

On March 12, Ishida scrambled to arrange for buses to evacuate patients from Futaba Hospital and its nursing-care unit. He managed to get several and went outside the town hall to make sure they arrived. About 200 patients were moved. But as the situation deteriorated the next day, drivers and transportation workers fled or refused to come to Okuma because of radiation fears.

The buses arrived March 14. Ishida's 96-year-old grandfather was among the second batch of patients to leave. He did not survive the journey.

In the meantime, all but two of Japan's 54 reactors are off-line. The last one could shut down by May, and with the public's trust of the nuclear industry shattered, the schedule for restarting them is unclear. Before the tsunami, Japan relied on nuclear power for one-third of its electricity.

Minoru Takahata, a disaster-management official in Omaezaki City, home to the Hamaoka nuclear power plant south of Tokyo, said the government's handling of the Fukushima crisis was "obviously poor." Hospitals have been instructed to reexamine their evacuation plans, and he said that they are doing so without help from Tokyo.

A camera mounted on the dashboard of a deliveryman's vehicle captured the impact of the earthquake and tsunami. See the video at www.philly.com/japanese

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