Japanese Search Teams Enter Irradiated Zone

The Wall Street Journal reports:

NAMIE, Japan—Nearly five weeks after search teams first combed northeastern Japan's tsunami-devastated shorelines for victims, they have ventured to the coastal town of Namie—once a hamlet of 20,000 people, now a time capsule of the March 11 tsunami's destruction situated less than five miles from the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.

On Friday, 280 police and firefighters descended on the deserted town wearing white head-to-toe radiation suits, waterproof boots, rubber gloves and face masks, belatedly picking through thick mud and the wreckage of homes, cars and boats. Searchers tossed aside mangled pieces of metal looking for bodies. Others they found in plain view.

Coming across an elderly woman lying in the fetal position, a young police officer on one search team placed a red bucket on the end of a six-foot long wooden rod and lifted it into the air, marking the site so a recovery crew could later carry her away. Within a few hours, four such flags could be seen for victims in an area about the size of 10 baseball fields.

Other tsunami-ravaged cities in northeastern Japan launched rescue efforts in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, and have brought their land searches largely to a close. But in the coastal towns within a 12-mile radius of the damaged reactors, the area set out by the Japanese government for mandatory evacuation, police and firefighters began only a week ago to look for bodies.

The efforts began in earnest as radiation levels dropped to a level where police felt comfortable sending in search crews, who were told to move from the zone's north—where the tsunami's devastation was greatest and radiation readings lower—toward the south. Friday's search brought police closer to the areas with the highest levels of radiation.

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