Kitaizumi in Minamisoma, the spot 26 km from Fukushima. Photo: Rees
In 2004 I had a pretty uneventful surf at Kitaizumi in Minamisoma, Fukushima. It was only waist-high but I remember sharing an early morning, glassy peak with three locals for an hour or two. Like a lot of Fukushima’s coastline, long lines of orange-tinted cliffs and the ever-present tetrapods stretch to the South, but the North side of the bay is dominated by the TEPCO thermal power plant which came online in 1997.
It’s a similar story 50km South at Iwasawa, where one of the most consistent beachbreaks in the area breaks right next to TEPCO’s oil-fired power station at Hirono built in the late ’70s. About half-way between the two is Kumagawa, a small rivermouth/beachbreak just a few km South of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant which started up in 1971. Fukushima Daini is another nuclear plant about 10km below Daiichi.
After the coal industry in Fukushima, particularly the Joban coalfield in Iwaki closed down in the ’60s, power plants like these filled the local employment void and blots on the landscape became a necessary evil. TEPCO made surface concessions to keep the locals happy while trumpeting the safety of nuclear power. Near Kitaizumi, they even sponsored a woodland area with nature trails called TEPCO Green Park.
It was a mellow, uneventful surf but I’ve been thinking about that session a lot more since I started driving a delivery truck back up to that area as part of the Save Minamisoma Project. I first joined these guys a couple of months ago in early April and had chance to go back up there again last weekend. The SMP are funded entirely by donations and do a trip every two weeks delivering food and safe drinking water to people who 15 months after the disaster are still living in temporary housing.
In Minamisoma alone there are over 8,000 people still living in temporary housing who either lost their homes in the tsunami or had to be evacuated from homes too close to the reactor in which case they may never be able to go back. I’ll write more about volunteering with the SMP later but they do much more than just deliver food and water. It’s about letting the residents know they aren’t forgotten by making the trip to see them every couple of weeks, and just spending some time to chat, listen and laugh together. You can read more about their great work here.
In a perfect world there’d be no need for these trips any more, but since the world ain’t perfect, the SMP plan to keep on making these trips as long as the local volunteers and residents keep inviting us.
Minamisoma itself, like Iwaki to the South has been relatively lucky in regard to radiation. The winds were blowing from the SE when the bulk of the radiation was released last March meaning that the coast near here, about 20-30km North of the reactor has pretty normal levels. It’s as you go inland and up towards the mountains, past towns like Iitate and Date, and then further on towards Koriyama and Fukushima City that the radiation levels really start to spike. Even though levels here are higher than those found in the old 20km and 30km zones the government still refuses to provide any assistance for families to evacuate.
The old 20km and 30km radius limits were pretty much meaningless as a safety guide anyway since much higher radiation can be found much further away to the North-East and then back South West again. You can see a map of the affected areas here.
The old 20km and 30km zones are shown as red circles. Kiatizumi is about halfway between the two circles in the light blue area.
Although this map is made from government data provided by MEXT, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports Science and Technology, it seems to be pretty accurate compared to real measurements I’ve taken around there.
