Radiation Fears and Distrust Push Thousands From Homes

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18displaced.html?src=twrhp

Neither last week’s earthquake, nor the tsunami that followed, nor days without electricity, water or heat could drive 70-year-old Sadako Shiga from her home. What finally caused her to flee was something invisible, but to her mind far more sinister: radiation.

As explosions and fires crippled a nuclear plant 18 miles from her home in northeast Fukushima Prefecture, Ms. Shiga and her family loaded their car with blankets, water and food and headed to the mountains. “We were running for our lives,” she said Thursday.

They are part of a swelling exodus — almost 10,000 residents, according to the national broadcaster NHK — who have been spurred by a spreading panic caused in part by distrust that the government is telling the full truth about the nuclear accidents and how widespread the danger is. The human tide is compounding a natural and now man-made calamity that has steadily built since the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit last Friday.

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But many, like Ms. Shiga, who live even beyond that zone, have decided for themselves that it is time to leave. And as they go, others follow.
These “nuclear refugees,” as they are roughly known, tell tales of arduous journeys, of scrounging to find gasoline amid post-disaster shortages, and arriving with just the clothes on their backs. Many are already traumatized by the tsunami that swept away entire towns in northern Japan, leaving more than 15,000 dead or missing.

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