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20,000 People dead-missing in Japan crisis-By Olivia Hampton
Workers struggled Sunday to restore power to a nuclear plant’s overheating reactors as the toll of dead or missing from Japan’s worst natural disaster in nearly a century surpassed 20,000.
The discovery of radiation in foodstuffs in regions around the plant, and of traces of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water well to the southwest, compounded public anxiety but authorities said there was no danger to health.
The Fukushima No. 1 plant was struck on March 11 by a massive earthquake and tsunami which, with 8,133 people confirmed killed, is Japan’s deadliest natural disaster since the Great Kanto quake levelled much of Tokyo in 1923.
Another 12,272 are missing, feared lost to the tsunami or buried in the wreckage of buildings. For half a million survivors, many huddled in poorly supplied and spartan shelters, conditions in the icy north are miserable.
Related article: Nuclear fears compound misery of Japan survivors
In Miyagi prefecture on the devastated northeast coast, where the 10-metre (33-foot) tsunami reduced entire towns to splintered matchwood, the death toll stood at 4,882.
But Miyagi police chief Naoto Takeuchi told a task force meeting that his prefecture alone “will need to secure facilities to keep the bodies of more than 15,000 people”, Jiji Press reported.
According to the charity Save the Children, around 100,000 children were displaced by the disaster, and signs of trauma are evident among survivors as the nuclear emergency and countless aftershocks heighten their terror.
“We found children in desperate conditions, huddling around kerosene lamps and wrapped in blankets,” Save the Children spokesman Ian Woolverton said after visiting a number of evacuation centres in Japan’s tsunami-hit northeast.
“They told me about their anxieties, especially their fears about radiation,” Woolverton said, adding that several youngsters had mentioned the US atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which they know from school.
Cooling systems that are meant to protect the Fukushima plant’s six reactors from a potentially disastrous meltdown were knocked out by the tsunami, and engineers have been battling ever since to put a lid on rising temperatures.
The radiation-suited crews were striving to partially restore electricity to the ageing facility 250 kilometres (155 miles) northeast of Tokyo, after extending a high-voltage cable into the site from the national grid.
But plant operator TEPCO said it would be hard by the end of Sunday to restart power to the cooling systems on two reactors that were badly damaged when a series of explosions tore away their outer buildings.
- EntTwist.com -