Soon after 11 a.m. on March 14, 2011, the loudspeakers crackled in
the crisis command center of Tokyo Electric Power Co.: "Headquarters,
headquarters," came the voice of Masao Yoshida, then-manager of Tepco's
Fukushima Daiichi power plant, where one of the world's worst nuclear
accidents was unfolding. "We have a big problem, we have a big problem.
It seems there has been an explosion at Unit 3." Pandemonium ensued.
Those
words were captured in footage taken inside the command centers of
Tepco during the Fukushima Daiichi accident, 150 hours of which the
company released for the first time Monday. The company posted an hour
and a half of the video on its website. The rest of the video was made
available to journalists at Tepco's Tokyo offices.
The
footage was recorded over Tepco's emergency videoconference system,
which linked feeds from Tepco's Tokyo headquarters with those from the
company's three nuclear plants and the government's crisis-management
center in Fukushima.
Tepco initially declined to release the videos, but new management installed by the government in June decided to do so.
The
videos show faces at a distance around conference tables. Many of the
faces are blurred to protect the speakers' privacy. Only a third of the
footage has audio -- nearly all of that from two days, March 13 and 14,
2011.
The
footage that Tepco released provides a firsthand look at the confusion
and disorganization among company executives, government officials and
regulators in the early days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami
knocked out power to Fukushima Daiichi. In one segment, from March 14,
Mr. Yoshida at Fukushima Daiichi and Tepco executives at headquarters
had a chaotic discussion over the best way to cool the overheating No. 2
reactor, with Mr. Yoshida yelling that the plant was running out of
time.
In
another segment, also on March 14, Tepco executives discussed when
might be the right time to order an evacuation of the plant.
Then-nuclear-operations chief Sakae Muto asked what the company's
accident manual said about evacuation. Another official confessed he
didn't remember.
"Any
remarks in the video footage should be looked at in a broader context,"
a Tepco spokesman said in the news briefing Monday. The company is
weighing whether to release additional videoconference records. The
company said in an internal investigation released in June, before the
management change, based on the video records as well as extensive
interviews, that there were no missteps in dealing with the crisis.
The
footage documents how Tepco executives scrambled at times to make sense
of what was going on. In an exchange following the March 14 explosion
at Unit 3, executives at Tokyo headquarters struggled with the wording
of a news release on what happened. "We don't know if it's a hydrogen
explosion," said one executive, who then added that government regulator
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency "said it's a hydrogen explosion on
TV. We 'd better toe the line."
"What do you think?" asked another executive. Then-President Masataka Shimizu said: "That's fine. Speed matters most."
Former
and current Tepco executives are facing a
5.5 trillion ($700
billion) civil lawsuit from a shareholders' group. The group accuses
Tepco executives of ignoring numerous warnings about tsunami risks at
Fukushima Daiichi and of operating a nuclear plant without the expertise
to handle severe accidents. Last week, public prosecutors agreed to
consider requests from citizens' groups demanding a criminal complaint
be filed against Tepco. A Tepco spokesman has declined to comment on
either case.
Any
litigation over who was responsible for the Fukushima Daiichi accident
is expected to take years. The plant's three reactors suffered partial
meltdowns and spewed radioactive particles, rendering parts of the
surrounding countryside uninhabitable for years.
The
video also shows the extraordinary strain Tepco workers were under as
the stricken plant spiraled out of control. In the early afternoon of
March 14, Mr. Yoshida told headquarters, "I'd like to report that
employees are in a state of shock after not being able to prevent the
two explosions. We are feeling down, all of us. We do what we can, but
morale is hurt pretty badly."
One
executive at headquarters told Mr. Yoshida that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa
plant in Niigata had offered to send 10 people. "We appreciate that
people are working in such difficult circumstances," Mr. Shimizu added.
"Hang in there for the moment."
Later,
it was Mr. Yoshida's turn to reassure executives at headquarters. In an
exchange between Mr. Yoshida and Mr. Muto, the two discussed a
radiation reading of 3.2 millisieverts per hour just logged at the plant
-- around three times the level Japanese would normally expect to
accumulate in a year.
Mr. Muto worried that the radiation reading was "extremely high."
Mr. Yoshida claimed it was "nothing," since the plant had seen similar levels many times.
"I tell you something," Mr. Yoshida said. "I don't think about radiation anymore."