Reuters March 21, 2011, 3:20 am
Miracle in Japan
An 80-year-old woman and her grandson have been pulled alive from the rubble in Japan, nine days after the earthquake hit.
(Reuters) - An 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson were rescued from their damaged home on Sunday in the city of Ishinomaki, nine days after the northeast was devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunami, NHK public TV said.
NHK quoted police in Miyagi prefecture as saying the two were weak but conscious.
An NHK reporter, quoting a doctor at the hospital to which the two were taken by helicopter, said the two had been trapped in their kitchen after the massive earthquake and survived by eating yoghurt and other food in the refrigerator.
The grandson eventually made it to the roof and waved down a rescue helicopter, the NHK reporter said.
The youth, Jin Abe, had low body temperature, was shaking and had no feeling in his left ankle, the reporter said.
An official at Ishinomaki's Red Cross hospital said the two had been carried into the hospital and were getting treatment.
"I only had a glimpse of the elderly woman, who had her eyes closed," the official said. "She didn't appear to be dead," the official said when asked if she was conscious.
Ishinomaki police were not immediately available to confirm the report.
On Saturday, Kyodo news agency and the military reported the "miracle rescue" of a young man pulled from the rubble of his home, only to find out that he had been in an evacuation center beforehand and just returned to his home.
(Reporting by Chikako Mogi; Editing by Nick Macfie and Sugita Katyal)
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Over 21,000 dead, missing amid nuke crisisOlivia Hampton, AAP
March 21, 2011, 4:39 am
The toll in Japan is likely to hit 21,000 as the nuclear crisis spreads to Japanese food and water supplies.
Workers are close to restoring 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 passes 21,000.
Amid the devastation on the north-east coast left by a massive quake and tsunami, police have reported an astonishing tale of survival with the discovery of an 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson alive under the rubble.
"Their temperatures were quite low but they were conscious. Details of their condition are not immediately known. They have been rescued and sent to hospital," a spokesman for the Ishinomaki police department said on Sunday.
They were in the kitchen when their house collapsed but the teenager was able to reach food from the refrigerator, helping them survive for nine days, broadcaster NHK quoted rescuers as saying.
But with half a million tsunami survivors huddled in threadbare, chilly shelters and the threat of disaster at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant stretching frayed nerves, the mood in the world's third-biggest economy remained grim.
Food contaminated with radiation was found for the first time outside Japan - where milk and spinach have already been tainted by a plume from Fukushima - as Taiwan detected radioactivity in a batch of imported Japanese fava beans.
The discovery of traces of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water, well to the south-west of the crippled atomic power plant on the Pacific coast, compounded public anxiety, but authorities said there was no danger to health.
The Fukushima plant was struck on March 11 by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami which, with 8450 people confirmed killed, is Japan's deadliest natural disaster since the Great Kanto quake levelled much of Tokyo in 1923.
Another 12,931 are missing, feared swept out to sea by the 10-metre tsunami or buried in the wreckage of buildings.
In Miyagi prefecture on the north-east coast, where the tsunami reduced entire towns to splintered matchwood, the official death toll stood at 5053, but the police chief warned that the number could eventually rise to 15,000.
Cooling systems meant to protect the Fukushima plant's six reactors from a potentially disastrous meltdown were knocked out by the massive waves, and engineers have since been battling to control rising temperatures.
Radiation-suited crews were striving to restore electricity to the ageing facility 250km north-east of Tokyo, after extending a high-voltage cable into the site from the national grid.
Engineers were checking the cooling and other systems at reactor No. 2 late on Sunday, aiming to restore the power soon, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said.
An external electricity supply has been restored to the distributor but power at the reactor unit was not yet back, spokesman Naohiro Omura said.
"It will take more time. It's not clear when we can try to restore the systems," he said.
Fire engines earlier aimed their water jets at the reactors and fuel rod pools, where overheating is an equal concern.
"Our desperate efforts to prevent the situation worsening are making certain progress," said chief government spokesman Yukio Edano.
"But we must not underestimate this situation, and we are not being optimistic that things will suddenly improve," he told a news conference.
Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said the temperature in all spent fuel-rod pools at the facility had dropped below 100 degrees Celsius - suggesting water-cooling operations were having some effect.
Authorities said reactors five and six at the Fukushima complex meanwhile were in "stable condition", Kyodo News reported.
Six workers at the plant have been exposed to high levels of radiation but are continuing to work and have suffered no health problems, TEPCO said.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan was to visit a staging ground for the Fukushima relief efforts on Monday, as well as the city of Ishinomaki, where the two survivors were found on Sunday.
According to the charity Save the Children, about 100,000 children were displaced by the quake and tsunami, and signs of trauma are evident among young survivors as the nuclear crisis and countless aftershocks fuel 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.
"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.
The government has insisted that there is no widespread threat of radiation. But the discovery of the tainted fava beans by Taiwanese customs officers will do nothing to calm public anxiety that has already spread far beyond Japan.
Several governments in Asia have begun systematic radiation checks on made-in-Japan goods, as well as of passengers arriving on flights from the country.
But Tsai Shu-chen of Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration stressed the radioactive iodine and caesium-137 found on the fava beans were well below legal safety levels.
In the disaster epicentre, authorities have been battling to get more fuel and food to survivors enduring freezing temperatures.
At shelters, some grandparents are telling children stories of how they overcame hardships in their childhood during and after World War II, which left Japan in ruins.
"We have to live at whatever cost," said Shigenori Kikuta, 72.
"We have to tell our young people to remember this and pass on our story to future generations, for when they become parents themselves."
There was better news for residents in Rikuzentakata, where construction teams began erecting 36 prefabricated units, the first of many more temporary houses being built for the tsunami homeless.
"They won't be very big, but whatever they are, it will be better than being in here," said great-grandmother Tokiko Kanno, who has been sleeping on a school stage.
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