What future for 'voluntary" evacuees?

April 17, 2015

‘Voluntary’ evacuees of Fukushima nuclear disaster face unclear future

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20150417p2a00m0na006000c.html

The approaching deadline for an announcement on whether the provision of emergency temporary housing will be extended has turned the spotlight on those whose evacuations from Fukushima Prefecture are considered "voluntary."

Immediately after the outbreak of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster, the Disaster Relief Act was applied to the entirety of Fukushima Prefecture, making emergency temporary housing facilities available to all Fukushima prefectural residents. Soon afterward, however, evacuation designations for individual municipalities were put into place, and residents were classified into those whose homes were within designated "no-go zones," referred to as "mandatory evacuees," and those whose homes were not in designated "no-go zones," referred to as "voluntary evacuees." In other words, this differentiation between so-called mandatory and voluntary evacuees was made after the residents had already fled their homes.

There are two main types of emergency temporary housing: prefabricated facilities built within Fukushima Prefecture, and public housing and rentals in and outside the prefecture appropriated for use as emergency temporary housing. Because the Fukushima Prefectural Government for the most part made housing within the prefecture available to mandatory evacuees only, many voluntary evacuees live in appropriated housing outside of Fukushima.

Under the Disaster Relief Act and related laws, emergency temporary housing is provided for two years, except for in extreme disasters, in which lease terms can be extended up to a year at a time. In the case of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, the provision of such housing went on for just over four years. The central and Fukushima prefectural governments have heretofore announced yearlong extensions three times between late April and late May each year. The expiration for the current extension is late March of 2016.

If the provision of emergency temporary housing were to be discontinued, mandatory evacuees have several options to choose from, including moving to disaster recovery public housing. Voluntary evacuees, meanwhile, do not meet the requirements for moving into such facilities, although many of them are reluctant to return home out of concerns over radiation exposure. Termination of the emergency temporary housing program would thus lead directly to unclear prospects for so-called voluntary evacuees.

Asked about appropriated temporary housing facilities during a House of Councilors Budget Committee meeting April 9, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed enthusiasm for continuing the program, saying, "I'd like to handle the issue in a way that puts residents at ease."

Why are extensions capped at a year at a time in the first place? The laws cite the durability of prefabricated facilities as the rationale for this rule.

According to the Disaster Relief Act and related regulations, the durability of prefabricated constructions dictates the initial term for the provision of emergency temporary housing as two years. The one-year extensions are made only after the structural durability of the facilities has been confirmed. Public housing and rentals appropriated as emergency temporary housing have longer-term durability than prefabricated housing, but the reasoning, according to a Cabinet Office official, is that the terms are made the same in both types of housing for the sake of fairness.

The evacuees, meanwhile, live in a constant state of uncertainty. A 43-year-old woman who has evacuated to Saitama Prefecture with her husband and two children in junior high and high school, respectively, longs for more stability. "Instead of one-year extensions, which don't allow us long-term prospects, we want to be able to live where we are for several more years until our children graduate from school," she said.

Susumu Tsukui, an attorney well-versed in residential issues surrounding evacuees, is critical of the current system. "It's wrong to set a time frame for emergency housing based on the durability of prefabricated housing," he said. "Instead of trying to cram the current situation into a pre-existing framework, we should be thinking about what needs to be done so that evacuees can live at ease."

Voluntary evacuees living in appropriated emergency temporary housing face other disadvantages, too.

In the spring of 2012, the municipal governments of the Fukushima Prefecture towns of Namie and Futaba -- both of which were wholly designated as no-go zones -- sought approval from the central government to allow evacuees to relocate to new appropriated housing facilities inside and outside the prefecture, a plea that was commonly heard among many evacuees. That August, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which at the time had jurisdiction over the Disaster Relief Act, and Fukushima plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. sent a notice to the Fukushima Prefectural Government that while they would not permit evacuees to relocate from one appropriated housing to another, evacuees would be able to receive compensation for rental fees of homes they move into after leaving temporary housing. In effect, this was an approval for mandatory evacuees to relocate but does not cover the relocation of voluntary evacuees.

The authorities' stance toward voluntary evacuation has been made clear by how it has tried to pass off the burden of rental fees for appropriated housing -- currently covered entirely by the national government -- to TEPCO.

Internal government documents obtained by the Mainichi Shimbun through a freedom of information request show that the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare and the Reconstruction Agency summoned officials from Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi, the three prefectures hit hardest by the 2011 disasters, as well as officials from Yamagata, Niigata, Tochigi and Saitama Prefectures, which have hosted large populations of voluntary evacuees, to the Fukushima Regional Bureau of Reconstruction in the Fukushima capital on May 24, 2013.

According to inside sources, a Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare official at the meeting proposed that each prefecture bill TEPCO directly for rental fees incurred by nuclear disaster evacuees, pointing to the example of the 1999 JCO nuclear incident in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, in which Ibaraki prefectural authorities received disaster relief funds from the plant operator. The proposal was abandoned, however, after prefectural officials objected, demanding why the prefectural governments and not the central government -- which had heretofore shouldered all the costs -- should have to charge the utility.

TEPCO has expressed reluctance to cover the rental fees of voluntary evacuees, and the government has deliberated the possibility of initially billing the power company for the rental fees incurred by mandatory evacuees, but a final decision has yet to be made. If the government ultimately decides not to charge TEPCO for the rental fees of voluntary evacuees, it would imply that TEPCO bears no responsibility for the evacuation of those people. Whoever eventually charges TEPCO for evacuation costs -- a role which prefectural and central government officials tried to foist onto each other in May 2013 -- will have to decide how voluntary evacuees are treated and explain the rationale behind the decision.

As one central government official said, "It all comes down to the fact that no one wants to be held accountable."

April 17, 2015(Mainichi Japan)