Japan battles nuclear emergency after deadly quake

The police chief in Miyagi prefecture said the death toll was certain to exceed 10,000 in his district.

UPDATED

TOKYO: Japan battled a feared meltdown of two reactors at a quake-hit nuclear plant Sunday, as the full horror of the disaster emerged on the ravaged northeast coast where more than 10,000 were feared dead.

An explosion at the ageing Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant blew apart the building housing one of its reactors Saturday, a day after the biggest quake ever recorded in Japan unleashed a monster 10-metre tsunami.

The atomic emergency widened Sunday as the cooling systems vital for preventing overheating failed at a second reactor, and the government warned there was a risk it too could be hit with a blast.

“There is the possibility of an explosion in the number-three reactor,” said Yukio Edano, the top government spokesman, while voicing confidence it would withstand the blast as the number-one reactor had the day before.

Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said earlier it was highly likely a meltdown had occurred in the first reactor, at the plant situated on the coast 250 kilometres northeast of Tokyo.

“As for the number-three reactor, we are acting on the assumption that it is possible,” he said.

Edano said some radiation had escaped, but that the levels released into the air had so far not reached levels high enough to affect human health.

Japan’s nuclear industry provides around a third of the nation’s power needs, and the government warned that the shutdown of several reactors may lead to a shortfall in supply that will make power outages necessary.

The colossal 8.9-magnitude tremor sent waves of mud and debris racing over towns and farming land in Japan’s northeast, destroying all before it and leaving the coast a swampy wasteland. Scene:Mud-strewn wastelands replace Japanese towns

10,000 death in port town

In the small port town of Minamisanriku alone some 10,000 people were unaccounted for — more than half the population of the town, which was practically erased, public broadcaster NHK reported.

The police chief in Miyagi prefecture — where Minamisanriku is situated — said the death toll was certain to exceed 10,000 in his district.

But in a rare piece of good news, a man who was swept 15 kilometres out to sea along with his house by the tsunami was plucked to safety Sunday after being spotted clinging to a piece of the roof.

Hiromitsu Shinkawa, 60, was discovered by a Japanese destroyer and transported by helicopter to hospital, where he was in surprisingly good health after his miracle rescue.

As the world’s third-largest economy struggled to assess the full extent of what Prime Minister Naoto Kan called an “unprecedented national disaster”, groups of hundreds of bodies were being found along the shattered coastline.

Edano said at least 1,000 people were believed to have lost their lives, and police said more than 215,000 people were huddled in emergency shelters.

In the city of Fukushima, about 80 kilometres northwest of the stricken plant, AFP reporters saw panic-buying at supermarkets and petrol stations that had run dry.

In Minamisoma town, which was virtually obliterated by the tsunami’s black tide of mud and debris, an AFP reporter saw fire volunteers collecting bodies found in the twisted wreckage of what had once been a residential area.

An elderly woman wrapped in a blanket tearfully recalled how she and her husband were evacuated from Kesennuma town, another fishing port which the tsunami swept through.

“I was trying to escape with my husband, but water quickly emerged against us and forced us to run up to the second story of a house of people we don’t even know at all,” she told NHK.

“Water still came up to the second floor, and before our eyes, the house’s owner and his daughter were flushed away. We couldn’t do anything. Nothing.”

The sheer power of the water tossed cars like small toys, upturned lorries that now litter the roads and left shipping containers piled up along the shore.

In Sendai city, where the haunting drone of tsunami sirens had echoed into the night, a hospital used generators to keep its lights blazing, drawing in weary survivors, but supplies of food and fuel were fast running out.

Mammoth rescue ops

The International Atomic Energy Agency said about 200,000 people had so far been evacuated from the area around the two Fukushima plants that house a total of 10 reactors.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency rated the incident at four on the international scale of zero to seven. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States was rated five, while the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was a seven.

A total of 22 people have been hospitalised after being exposed to radioactivity, although it was not immediately clear to what degree they were exposed and what condition they were in.

Japan committed 100,000 troops — about 40 percent of the armed forces — to spearhead a mammoth rescue and recovery effort with hundreds of ships, aircraft and vehicles headed to the Pacific coast area.

“There are so many people who are still isolated and waiting for assistance. This reality is very stark,” Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa was quoted as saying by Kyodo News.

The world rallied behind the disaster-stricken nation, with offers of help even from Japan’s traditional rivals. Despite a territorial row that has soured relations, China sent a team of rescuers who were due to arrive Sunday.

The US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan reached waters off the northeast coast Sunday, part of a flotilla sent by Japan’s close ally which has nearly 50,000 military personnel in the country. Related article:World rushes aid to qiake-hit Japan

The massive earthquake, one of the largest in recorded history, appears to have shifted the main Japanese island by about eight feet, the US Geological Survey said.

Two days after it struck about 400 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, aftershocks were still rattling the region, including a strong 6.8 magnitude tremor on Saturday and a 6.3 quake on Sunday.

Japan sits on the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, and Tokyo is in one of its most dangerous areas, where three continental plates are slowly grinding against each other, building up enormous seismic pressure.

- AFP