of March 15. Hundreds of firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and workers from Tokyo Electric Power convened at the sports training center, arguing long and loudly about how best to restore cooling systems and prevent nuclear fuel from overheating. Complicating matters, a lack of phone service meant that they had little input from upper management.
“There were so many ideas, the meeting turned into a panic,” said one longtime Tokyo Electric veteran present that day. He made the comments in an interview with The New York Times, one of several interviews that provided a rare glimpse of the crisis as the company’s workers experienced it. “There were serious arguments between the various sections about whether to go, how to use electrical lines, which facilities to use and so on.”
The quarreling echoed the alarm bells ringing throughout Tokyo Electric, which has been grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges since March 11, when the severe earthquake and massive tsunami upended northeastern Japan. It is also an insight, through interviews, e-mails and blog posts, into the problems faced by the thousands of often anxious but eager Tokyo Electric Power employees working to re-establish order.
Many of them — especially the small number charged with approaching damaged reactors and exposing themselves to unusually high doses of radiation — are viewed as heroes, preventing the world’s second-worst nuclear calamity from becoming even more dire.
But unlike their bosses, who appear daily in blue work coats to apologize to the public and explain why the company has not yet succeeded in taming the reactors, the front-line workers have remained almost entirely anonymous.
In the interviews and in some e-mail and published blog items, several line workers expressed frustration at the slow pace of the recovery efforts, sometimes conflicting orders from their bosses and unavoidable hurdles like damaged roads. In many cases, the line workers want the public to know that they feel remorse for the nuclear crisis, but also that they are trying their best to fix it.
“My town is gone,” wrote a worker named Emiko Ueno, in an email obtained by The Times. “My parents are still missing. I still cannot get in the area because of the evacuation order. I still have to work in such a mental state. This is my limit.”
At the top, a manager who circulated her note urged his workers to “please think about what you can do for Fukushima after reading this e-mail.”
Tokyo Electric keeps a tight lid on its workers under normal circumstances, and workers say they risk censure for speaking out. Some, however, have become lightning rods. Soon after the crisis began, Michiko Otsuki, who worked at the Daiichi plant after the earthquake, wrote on a social media site called Mixi that Tokyo Electric workers were trying hard and risking their lives to repair the plant.
She apologized for the confusion and the insecurity that people felt as a result of the nuclear accident. But Ms. Otsuki soon removed the post from her site because, she said, people had misinterpreted what she meant to say. It was too early, she added, to ask people to stop being critical of Tokyo Electric.
In the early days after the earthquake and tsunami, many Tokyo Electric workers had little time to speak out. An explosion had blown the roof off one of the reactor buildings in Fukushima, heightening fears of large-scale radiation exposure. To stabilize the reactors and restart cooling systems, the company rushed to reconnect the power plant to the electric grid.
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