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According to the Asahi’s interpretation of events, 90% of senior employees violated Mr. Yoshida’s orders and left on the morning of March 15 for the Fukushima Daini plant, 10 kilometers to the south. At that point, the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s reactor buildings had suffered multiple explosions and radiation was rising.
originally posted by: theworldisnotenough
Link: Fukushima Watch: Plant Manager’s Testimony Stirs Debate.
A prior thread of mine, which was moved to the ATS Skunk Works forum, raised the question as to when, exactly, this evacuation of Daiichi plant workers actutally took place. I speculated that it occurred BEFORE the earthquake and tsunami. (See: This Guy Says Fukushima Almost Ignited the Atmosphere BEFORE the Quake and Tsunami.)
P.M.
originally posted by: DancedWithWolves
a reply to: theworldisnotenough
The staff announced after the tsunami that the plant was being evacuated when meltdowns were underway. They were ordered by the government to stay. It is documented in the Part 1 thread noted in my signature. It would take some digging to find, but it is there.
TOKYO — At the most dire moment of the Fukushima nuclear crisis three years ago, hundreds of panicked employees abandoned the damaged plant despite being ordered to remain on hand for last-ditch efforts to regain control of its runaway reactors, according to a previously undisclosed record of the accident that was reported Tuesday by a major Japanese newspaper.
The newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun, said that the episode was described by Masao Yoshida, the manager of the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the time of the accident, in a series of interviews conducted by government investigators several months after the March 2011 disaster.
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of a 400-page transcript of the interviews, which had been referred to in government accounts of the accident but had never been released in its entirety.
Such a transcript could represent the only testimony of the accident left by Mr. Yoshida, who died last year of cancer at the age of 58. Mr. Yoshida is widely viewed in Japan as one of the disaster’s few heroes for preventing the crisis from spinning out of control by defying an order to stop pouring seawater on the overheating reactors.