A woman identifying herself as a 22-year-old worker inside the Fukushima nuclear plant when the tsunami hit has described the exhaustion, bravery and anguish of her co-workers, including those still inside, fighting to prevent a catastrophe.
“Everyone at the plant is battling on, without running away,” Michiko Otsuki wrote on her blog on the Japanese social networking site Mixi.
Some fellow Mixi bloggers spotted the post and at least one reproduced an English version. The Straits Times, a Singapore newspaper, also translated and published her words.
“In the midst of the tsunami alarm (last Friday), at 3 a.m. in the night when we couldn’t even see where we were going, we carried on working to restore the reactors from where we were, right by the sea, with the realization that this could be certain death,” Otsuki wrote.
The level 9 earthquake hit at 2:46 p.m. Japanese time on Friday and the tsunami shortly after.
“The machine that cools the reactor is just by the ocean, and it was wrecked by the tsunami. Everyone worked desperately to try and restore it. Fighting fatigue and empty stomachs, we dragged ourselves back to work.
“If we could not recover the cooling system, the second plant would have exploded as the first one. But we, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co.) could manage to prevent it.
“The damage by tsunami was far beyond than (sic) everybody could ever think of. If there is only the earthquake, the explosion of the first plant should not have happened.
“All of us have been working hard without thinking of their own lives.”
Otsuki said her boyfriend is one of those still inside the crippled reactor, a group called the Fearless 50 working under horrendous conditions to try to keep the reactors cool.
“All I can do now is just pray for everyone,” she wrote. “The workers in the plant must have the most fear. Yet they, TEPCO and related companies are confronting it.”
Otsuki included her name, she said, “knowing I will be abused and hurt because of this.”
The blog post has since been taken down. In its place, Otsuki posted an apology, saying she closed the post because others were using her words to fan fear.
Great find!
The workers are very brave.
Wow. So they knew early on the severity of the situation ?