With all the 10,000 residents of Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, still evacuated from the March 2011 nuclear accident, many of the elderly are hoping to live their final years in their hometown.
With all the 10,000 residents of Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, still evacuated from the March 2011 nuclear accident, many of the elderly are hoping to live their final years in their hometown.
In response, Okuma has set up a project team during the current fiscal year to construct apartment buildings within two years for elderly residents wanting to return home.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant that caused the accident, also plans to construct dormitories for its employees in Okuma, which co-hosts the crippled plant, along with the neighboring town of Futaba.
These housing projects demonstrate that attempts to restore people’s lives in the town have begun, according to Okuma officials and TEPCO.
After the nuclear accident triggered by the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, all the residents of Okuma evacuated to other municipalities, including Aizuwakamatsu in western Fukushima Prefecture.
Many of the evacuees are still living in temporary housing. Some of the elderly are unable to leave those facilities because they are poor or have no relatives to turn to.
Many of the elderly evacuees are saying, “In the final years of my life, I want to live in my hometown where I was born and grew up.”
The candidate site for the construction of apartment buildings to house them is the Ogawara district in southwestern Okuma.
The district is designated a “no-residence zone,” where radiation levels in the air are relatively low, though many other areas of the town are deemed “difficult-to-return zones,” where radiation levels remain high.
Decontamination work has already concluded in the Ogawara district. As a result, the radiation levels there have fallen to less than one-tenth the standard level required to allow for the return of residents.
In the daytime, people can enter the district without obtaining permission. Because of that, workers for the reconstruction of the area are working there during the day. Infrastructure facilities, including the water supply, are expected to be restored soon.
The central government is aiming to lift the evacuation order for no-residence zones, including the Ogawara district, by March 2017. By that time, Okuma officials plan to have completed the construction of the apartment buildings for elderly residents.
“Judging from the feedback we received in repeated meetings with residents, about 100 people will move into the apartment buildings,” a high-ranking town government official said.
TEPCO’s dormitories will also be constructed in the Ogawara district. Almost all of the land owners for the buildings have already given permission for the use of their properties. As the dormitories will be completed in 2016 at the earliest, TEPCO employees who will live in them will become the first people to reside in Okuma since all the residents evacuated in March 2011.
Though the evacuation orders are still in effect for the entire town through 2016, TEPCO employees will be allowed to live in the dormitories under special permission granted to those engaged in the decommissioning of the nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, in Naraha and some other municipalities, where evacuation orders have already been lifted, efforts to return residents have made little progress.
In Okuma, the central areas of the town are designated as difficult-to-return zones. Therefore, there is no prospect for evacuation orders to be lifted for the areas where most of the residents were living before the nuclear accident.