Heroes of the meltdown
By Mark Willacy.
Forty-one minutes after the earthquake's opening shudder, the first tsunami crashed over the front line of defence at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant: a 2.5-kilometre breakwater of 60,000 concrete blocks. Eight minutes later, an even larger wave surged over the second and last line of protection: the compound's 5.7-metre seawall. Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) earthquake-proof bunker was just 400 metres from the seawall, but it sat on a raised area 35 metres above sea level. Inside it, on the monitor, the company's employees watched a fast-moving wave the colour of oil roiling across the Sendai Plain, further north up the coast. It was pushing fishing boats inland, exploding plastic greenhouses and picking up parked trucks. In the images taken from a news helicopter on March 11, Takashi Sato, the reactor inspector at Fukushima Dai-ichi, could see the black wave tearing apart homes.
"The tsunami has hit the side of the turbine buildings." It was not the TV, but a voice inside the bunker. Sato was jolted away from the television. What did they say? Only then did he realise the same wave had hit the Fukushima coast, too.
'We are finished,' thought Sato. All around him he could hear the muttering of men who believed they were damned.
"The tsunami alarm said the height would be about three metres," said Atsufumi Yoshizawa, the director of Reactors 5 and 6 at Fukushima Dai-ichi, who was outranked only by plant manager Masao Yoshida. A lithe, quietly spoken man with neatly parted salt-and-pepper hair, Yoshizawa was a TEPCO veteran of 30 years.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/heroes-of-the-meltdown-20130617-2ocz5.html
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