Andrew Gilligan, Fukushima
March 28, 2011
Engineers in the control room of the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant brave dangerously high levels of radiation in a bid to stabilise the stricken reactor. Photo: AFP A small band of brave men are risking their lives.
THEY lined up to be checked for radiation, dressed for the most part in identical grey-hooded sweatshirts and brown tracksuit pants, their own contaminated clothes clutched in transparent plastic bags.
Several looked utterly shattered - unshaven, haggard, with deep rings round their eyes. Hardly surprising, given where they'd just come from and where they must, in only a few hours, return.
The extraordinary courage of the ''Fukushima Fifty'', the skeleton crew risking their own lives to save their country from nuclear disaster, has gripped the world. But the Fifty themselves - or the several hundred, in fact, with shifts and rotations - have been the invisible heroes, the darkness at the centre of the spotlight. Until now.
They turned from faceless supermen into real, scared people with names and families. They told of frightening work in narrow, dark spaces, of their fear and the fear of their loved ones, but of their determination to go on.
''It was just pitch black,'' said Kazuhiko Fukudome, who led a company from Tokyo fire brigade's hyper rescue squad to the collapsing No. 3 reactor as it started to melt down. ''It was the middle of the night and all we had to see with were our own head torches. We could see smoke and vapour coming up from the reactor. Everything else had failed, so they called us in to pump seawater to try to cool the thing. We don't even work for the government, but for the city of Tokyo. They were desperate. They must have been on their last legs.''
The squad's riskiest mission began with a phone call at 11pm. ''It was a very simple call,'' Mr Fukudome said. ''They just said gather your men and get to Fukushima, and then they hung up. I turned to my wife and said, 'I'm going to Fukushima'. She looked shocked, but then she put on her calm face and she just said, 'Take care'. She knows that if she keeps a brave face, it helps me.''
The thought of refusing to go didn't even cross Mr Fukudome's mind, but plenty of other thoughts did. ''It was pretty quiet on the journey up to the plant,'' he said. ''There was a lot of worry among us. Most of the jobs we do, we practise for, but this was an unseen enemy.''
Arriving at the plant at 2am, the squad split into three. One of their Scorpion fire trucks went as close as it could to the seashore, to suck up the water needed. Another drove to within two metres of the reactor building itself, to do the actual spraying. The third fire engine was parked in between, as a relay point for the kilometre of yellow fire hose.
''It was far worse than I expected. Everything was covered in rubble,'' Mr Fukudome said. ''There were concrete blocks everywhere, all the manhole covers had popped out, for some reason, and the road was impassable. We couldn't drive down to pay out the hose from the sea. So we had to run, carrying the hose, half a mile to the sea, in total darkness.''
An escape car waited nearby, to whisk the men away if radiation levels spiked. But radioactivity harmful to human health was pouring from the reactor the whole time.
''We would call out to each other, 'Only a bit more to go! Let's keep going! Pull the hose out a little bit further!', that sort of thing,'' Mr Fukudome said. The moment we saw the water come out of the hose and hit the reactor, we all shouted 'Yes!' and clenched our fists in the air. Then we could go back a bit because the hoses could operate automatically.''
Respirators aside, they wore little more than their normal uniforms, orange boiler suits with a cartoon St Bernard dog patch on the upper arm. ''We wore what I'm wearing now,'' said Mr Fukudome. ''Over our overalls, we had thin white suits and, over that, our uniform coats''.
Had he been irradiated? ''Yes,'' he said, not noticeably worried.
''We were 26 hours on the site and then when we got to the rest place, they screened us. My clothes and socks had quite a bit of radiation, so they were confiscated. We were scrubbed, then they measured me again. I still wasn't totally clear, but clear enough - so they let me go.''
Was he feeling all right? ''Yes,'' he said, smiling. ''Look, this might sound funny, but I think I will be safe. Even though my outer clothes were affected, not much got on my body.'' TELEGRAPH
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