Russian embassy evacuates Russian woman from area of stricken NPS

TOKYO, March 20 (Itar-Tass) - It took six hours for the Russian
embassy in Tokyo to evacuate on Saturday a Russian woman citizen, blocked in a semi-destroyed suburb of the Japanese city of Koriyama, located only 37 kilometres from the stricken Fukushima-1 nuclear power station.
"A phone call from her was received by our 'hot line'," Itar-Tass
learnt on Sunday from third secretary Yuri Melnik. "The woman, called
Zhanna, was not injured, but wanted very much to be evacuated. She and her Japanese husband live in a zone of devastating destruction; trains don't run there, and there is no petrol for cars.
"A bus arrives at a working railway station once a day, but all
tickets were sold out. In a word, we took a decision in agreement with
local Russian rescuers and drove to her in an embassy car."
"The Tohoku expressway, running across this area, is closed for
ordinary traffic," the diplomat said. "Columns of special motor vehicles speed along it - military, police, fire trucks as well as a huge number of trucks, supplying food and other necessities to stricken districts. In actual fact, it is the only artery, connecting now the calamity zone with the rest of Japan."
The state of the Tohoku highway is not typical at all for Japan. It was heavily damaged. Holes were already patched by Japanese, but they had no time to do anything to sections where soil bulged or caved in as a result of the devastating quake. Special warning signs stand there.
"Zhanna (Eds: her surname is not called for ethical reasons) received a warning by a handphone several seconds before the disastrous quake," describes Melnik. "She ran out of the house: window frames were dashed from the house, splitting glasses before her own eyes. There was dreadful thunder, and the woman even felt that she was deaf.
Following this, Zhanna could not make herself enter the home for about 90 minutes. The house was damaged badly. One of the walls crumbled. Her husband and she now think that it is useless to restore their home: it is better to build a new one. Incidentally, the area is located 37 kilometres from the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant where strong discharges of radiation were recorded.
People were fully evacuated there in the zone 20 kilometres from the station. Population was ordered not to leave their homes in the zone located 10 kilometres from the first one.
"Zhanna is a native of Khabarovsk," the diplomat continues, "her
relatives prayed her in panic to come back. She wants to spend a month at her homeland so as to calm down her aged relatives. She asked her husband to go with her, but he said that he would be preoccupied with the partly destroyed house.
How much time did the operation take to evacuate the woman? It took six hours from the time of the reception of the call and up to her arrival in Tokyo. Incidentally, the distance from Koriyama to the Japanese capital is 260 kilometres one way. And it will take 24 hours between Zhanna's call and her departure for Russia.
She is now at Tokyo's Narita airport, waiting for her flight to
Khabarovsk by a plane of the Russian Ministry for Emergencies.