Japan death toll may exceed 20,000

TOKYO—Struggling to avert a catastrophe, Japan on Sunday restored power to a crippled nuclear reactor as police found alive an 80-year-old woman and her teenage grandson in the rubble of an earthquake and tsunami that may have killed more than 20,000 people.

Police said they believed more than 15,000 people had been killed by the double disaster in Miyagi prefecture alone.

Three hundred engineers have been struggling inside the danger zone to salvage the six-reactor Fukushima power station in the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years ago.

“I think the situation is improving step by step,” Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama told a news conference.

Adding to the good news, 16-year-old Jin Abe and her grandmother were rescued after nine days of being trapped in the wreckage of their flattened two-story house in the hard-hit city of Ishinomaki in northeastern Japan. Jin was able to pull himself out of the debris and shouted for help.

Jin was seen calling out for help from the roof of the collapsed home, according to the Miyagi police. Like other homes in northeastern Japan, they had lost electricity and telephone service in the March 11 earthquake.

Jin led rescuers inside to his grandmother, Sumi Abe. Both were conscious but weak, and they survived on the food they had in their refrigerator, said Shizuo Kawamura of the Ishinomaki police department.

The grandmother could not get out of the house because she had trouble walking, and the teenager, who was suffering from a low body temperature, had been unable until Sunday to pull himself from the wreckage, Kawamura told The Associated Press by telephone.

They were found by local police who realized they couldn’t get the woman out of the collapsed house and had to call other rescuers, he said.

Public broadcaster NHK showed video of the stunned but coherent woman being placed on a stretcher.

When asked if she was hurt, she said no.

Kawamura said that while the rescue was a reason for joy, the police had “too many other victims to find to take the time to celebrate.”

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.

Dead and missing

The number of people confirmed dead or listed as missing has surpassed 20,000, including 15,000 in Miyagi. There were fears of a far higher death toll.

The national police agency said 8,133 people had been confirmed dead and 12,272 officially listed as missing—a total of 20,405—as of noon Sunday.

The death toll has now far surpassed that of the 7.2-magnitude quake which struck the western Japanese port city of Kobe in 1995, killing 6,434 people.

The March 11 quake has also become Japan’s deadliest natural disaster since the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 142,000 people.

More than 360,000 people have been displaced from their homes and taken shelter in evacuation facilities in 15 prefectures.

Braving high radiation levels in suits sealed in duct tape, the engineers managed to connect power to the No. 2 reactor, crucial to their attempts to cool it down and limit the leak of deadly radiation, Kyodo news agency said.

It added that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.
(TEPCO) aimed to restore the control room function, lights and the cooling at the No. 1 reactor, which is connected to the No. 2 reactor by cable.

But rising cases of contaminated vegetables, dust and water have raised new fears, and the government said it would decide by Monday on whether to restrict consumption and shipments of food from the quake zone.

The unprecedented crisis will cost the world’s third-largest economy as much as $248 billion and require Japan’s biggest reconstruction push since World War II. It has also set back nuclear power plans the world over.

Economic Minister Kaoru Yosano said government spending was likely to exceed the 3.3 trillion yen ($40.8 billion) that Tokyo had spent after Kobe, which up to now has been considered the world’s costliest natural disaster.

Turning point?

Encouragingly for the Japanese transfixed on work at the Fukushima complex, the most critical reactor—No. 3, which contains highly toxic plutonium—seemed to have stabilized after military and civilian firefighters had doused it with 2,400 tons of seawater for nearly 14 hours through early Sunday.

“We believe the water is having a cooling effect,” a Tepco official said.

Workers aim to reach the troubled No. 4 reactor on Monday or Tuesday.

If successful, that could be a turning point in a crisis rated as bad as America’s 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

If not, drastic measures may be required, such as burying the plant in sand and concrete, as what happened at Chernobyl in 1986, though experts warn that could take many months and the fuel had to be cooled first.

Contaminated food

On the negative side, evidence has begun emerging of radiation leaks from the plant, including into food and water.

Traces exceeding Japanese safety standards were found in milk from a farm about 30 kilometers from the plant and spinach grown in neighboring Ibaraki prefecture.

Tiny levels of radioactive iodine have also been found in tap water in Tokyo, about 240 km to south.

In Taiwan, authorities checking food for radiation on Sunday found a shipment of fava beans from southern Japan had been contaminated, an official said. The radiation was found on 14 kilograms of fava beans from Kagoshima.

It is the first report of contaminated food being found outside Japan since the crisis began. Kagoshima, at the southwestern tip of the Kyushu island, is more than 1,100 km from the quake epicenter. Reports from Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press