Ignoring official assurances that the exposure limit and current radiation readings in the area posed no threat to children’s health, parents and teachers in Otama and five other communities in Fukushima prefecture started removing and burying topsoil from school playgrounds. At schools where mechanical diggers were hard to come by, parents shovelled the soil themselves.
The cleanup drew a dismissive response from Yukio Edano, the government’s chief spokesman.
“Based on guidelines by the education and science ministries, there is no need for [soil] removal,” he said.
But Oyama’s principal, Hiroyuki Ando, said parental pressure, and the fear of the possible effects of long-term exposure to contaminants in the soil, had left him with no choice.
“We were worried about high radiation levels, particularly caesium in topsoil, so we consulted scientists and the local education authorities and removed the soil ourselves,” he said.
The steps produced immediate results: radiation readings in topsoil outside Ando’s school dropped from 1.32 microsieverts to 0.25 microsieverts an hour, compared with a pre-disaster reading of 0.04 microsieverts.
Well, time will tell, won’t it? In ten to twenty years we’ll have a really good idea of just how safe or how dangerous these levels of radiation were … I don’t think it’s fair to subject these children to such tests.
