Christiane Amanpour Reports: Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Worker Describes Quake's Impact
TOKYO, March 14, 2011— -- I spoke exclusively with American workers who have been in Japan for the last two months working on the Fukushima nuclear plant, renovating one of its reactors. They had just completed work on it the day before the earthquake struck.
This disaster, the worst earthquake and tsunami ever recorded in Japan, dealt a knock-out blow to the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear reactor. Barely 24 hours later, an explosion at the first reactor destroyed the outer wall.
American worker Greg Henderson told me he had worked in at least 15 plants in Japan, and had just left the Fukushima plant when the earthquake struck.
Although there have been concerns over deadly radiation exposure and a possible meltdown since the quake happened, Henderson said working in a nuclear power plant was just as safe as working in a grocery store.
"It's just like any other business, it just has more safety," he said. "I'd rather work in a nuclear plant than anywhere else. It's safe."
Now Henderson is bunkered down at a hotel in Tokyo, trying to get back to the U.S. He described what it was like to live through the quake.
"I heard claps like a big smack up against the wall," he told me. "I'm sitting in a chair...[the earthquake] throws me and the chair to the floor, and the TV sitting on the desk landed in my lap."
"I look out the window and I can tell the building is shaking, swaying back and forth," he said. "I could see cracking. I looked at the corners of the walls and they're shifting back and forth. The split goes through the wall and I look at the ceiling and go, well do I sit here and ride it out or do I try to get out."
Despite items falling all around him during the quake, Henderson said he knew he would survive.
"I'm not dying in Japan," he said. "I mean, I know that...I was in Vietnam in 1970, and felt then, and feel now, that you are in survival mode, but you gotta do whatever you do."
