Relatives of seven patients who died in the course of evacuating a hospital near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear disaster site are planning to sue the plant operator for compensation.
Relatives of seven patients who died in the course of evacuating a hospital near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear disaster site are planning to sue the plant operator for compensation.
They blame Tokyo Electric Power Co. for the chaos that ensued when it lost control of three reactors and contributed to a muddled evacuation of surrounding districts. In all, 40 patients from Futaba Hospital died during the initial evacuation or shortly thereafter.
In July, a government commission said a delay in evacuating patients was largely due to poor cooperation between the prefectural government, the Self-Defense Forces and the police. It did not fault hospital officials. The findings were published in the final report of the central government's Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations.
The claimants plan to file a lawsuit demanding 30 million yen ($321,000) for each of the seven victims at the Tokyo District Court on the grounds that TEPCO's nuclear accident was the causative factor. They decided to name TEPCO alone so as to clarify where the responsibility lies and to try to limit the court case from becoming too drawn out.
The first four claimants will file their bids in March.
"We cannot comment because we are not aware that the lawsuit has in fact been submitted. If it is submitted, we will deal with it in a sincere manner," said a TEPCO official.
Futaba Hospital lies about five kilometers southwest of the Fukushima No. 1 plant. At the time of the accident in March 2011, the facility held about 340 patients, most of them senior citizens.
The government panel and hospital officials said evacuations began on March 12, 2011, after the central government issued an order for all residents within a 10-kilometer radius of the plant to leave.
However, the evacuation was disrupted because the plant began to experience devastating hydrogen explosions.
It took close to five days to evacuate the hospital fully, by which time four patients had died there. Another 15 passed away in or shortly after transit, and later in March, an additional 21 patients died while being moved again to sites farther from the disaster zone.
Fumio Shinkai, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the seven victims referred to in this lawsuit were between 60 and 100 in age.
The bereaved family members will argue that were it not for the accident, the patients would not have been forced to evacuate, and there would have been no interruption of their care and treatment.
One couple involved is Masayoshi and Noriko Abe, aged 76 and 71, respectively. They now live in Soma because their home in Namie--about eight kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 plant--was swept away by the tsunami in March 2011.
In the Buddhist altar inside their new home is a photo of Masayoshi's father, Tadashi, who was 99 when he died.
In 2004, Tadashi entered a facility affiliated with Futaba Hospital which specialized in the care of senior citizens. He was subsequently admitted to the hospital itself after suffering a stroke and pneumonia.
Because she had lost her own father when she was only 3, Noriko felt she had inherited another after marriage. She would go to the hospital almost daily to check on Tadashi.
She visited Futaba Hospital for the final time on March 10, 2011. Because Tadashi was hard of hearing, Noriko had to speak loudly.
"Grandpa? How are you feeling?" she asked. "We have to celebrate your 100th birthday in November."
Tadashi replied, "Don't worry about me—because I plan to live until I am 120!"
That was the last exchange the pair had.
After the earthquake struck, Noriko frantically called the hospital a number of times, even while first fleeing the tsunami and later the radiation scare. However, she could never get through.
A few days later, she saw a news report that said a large number of Futaba Hospital patients had died while being evacuated to a gymnasium. She fretted even more.
On March 20, she found her father-in-law dead, lying in a coffin in a gymnasium in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture.
She felt she should somehow have prevented his untimely death, and was beside herself with regret.
It turned out that Tadashi was one of the patients who remained in the hospital for some time after the evacuation order was first given.
Early on March 14, an SDF bus drove him to a facility in Minami-Soma. There, he cleared a check-up for radiation exposure, and was taken by bus to a high school gymnasium in Iwaki.
The bus arrived at the gym at 8 p.m. Tadashi was so cold he needed two blankets to keep warm. He died on March 16 from heart failure.
"He might not have died if he had been rescued earlier," said a doctor from Futaba Hospital.
In spring 2012, Noriko submitted an application for compensation to TEPCO to cover the cost of Tadashi's funeral and for purchasing a Buddhist home altar to honor him. It was not really the money she was interested in, she said, but an admission from the utility of where it felt responsibility lay.
She could not have predicted the humiliating response by a clerk when she tried to file the application: "These items are not presently covered for compensation," the representative declared.
Noriko felt like crying.
TEPCO eventually relented up to a point, and offered to meet compensation claims from relatives of those who died during the delayed evacuation from a hospital in Minami-Soma.
But by that time, Noriko had decided which course of action she would take.
"Even if we end up losing and having to pay court costs, I want to determine why Grandpa had to die."
(This article was compiled from reports by Shinichi Fujiwara and Noriyoshi Ohtsuki.)