TOKYO: Alarm over Japan's nuclear disaster grew Thursday with more foreign governments advising citizens to flee Tokyo as army helicopters dumped water on the overheating plant at the center of the crisis. Six days after a massive earthquake and tsunami plunged Japan into its worst crisis since World War II, the US and Britain chartered flights for nationals trying to leave and China moved thousands of citizens to Tokyo for evacuation. Commercial airline tickets were scarce and some companies hired private jets to evacuate staff. In Tokyo the streets were quiet but calm as the Japanese people, though deeply concerned, mostly remained stoic over the emergency. At the stricken Fukushima No. 1 plant, 250 km from Tokyo, Chinook military helicopters dumped tons of water in a desperate bid to cool reactors crippled by the earthquake to prevent a catastrophic meltdown. Fire engines were put into action to douse fuel rods inside reactors and containment pools submerged under water to stop them from degrading due to exposure to the air and emitting dangerous radioactive material. “Based on what experts have told us, it's important to have a certain level of water (in the pools) before we can start to see any positive effect,” Chief government spokesman Yukio Edano told reporters. The official toll of the dead and missing from the twin disasters, which pulverised the northeast coast, now approached 15,000, police said, as aftershocks continued to rattle a jittery nation. The number of confirmed dead stood at 5,457, with more than 80,000 buildings damaged and 4,798 destroyed. But as Japanese and international teams mounted a massive search and relief effort, reports from some battered coastal towns suggested the final death toll could be far higher. Millions of people have been left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food and hundreds of thousands more are homeless, the misery compounded by heavy snowfalls, freezing cold and wet conditions. Thick snow covered wreckage littering quake-hit areas, all but extinguishing hopes of finding anyone alive in the debris. A cold snap brought heavy blizzards over the country's northeast overnight, covering the tsunami-razed region in deep snow and vital highways in ice. The latest threat at the Fukushima plant was the fuel-rod pools, which contain used rods that have been withdrawn from reactors yet remain highly radioactive. They are immersed in cooling water for many years until they shed enough heat to become manageable for storage. Water in one of the pools was evaporating because of the rods' heat, and temperatures were slowly rising in two other pools because coolant pumps were knocked out by the March 11 quake and tsunami, experts said. They warned that if the tanks run dry and leave the fuel rods exposed, the rods could melt or catch fire, creating potentially lethal levels of radiation. At the same time, Japanese engineers were focused on restoring the power supply to the stricken power plant in an attempt to reactivate its cooling system. US President Barack Obama offered to give Japan any support that it needs, in a telephone call with Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the Japanese leader's spokesman said. The Japanese government has told people living up to 10 km beyond a 20-km exclusion zone around the crippled plant to stay indoors. More than 200,000 people have already been cleared from the zone. US officials however warned citizens living within 80 km of the plant to evacuate or seek shelter. The evacuation plans came against a background of mounting concern over the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano said the situation was “very serious” as he prepared to fly out to see the damage for himself. In Taiwan, authorities said they had detected radioactive particles on 26 air passengers arriving from Japan, while inspectors in South Korea reportedly detected radiation on the coat of a man also coming from Japan.
