Parents spooked by tap water threat

Kazuko Hara, pushing her three-month-old daughter Nagomi in a stroller, queues up with other parents in Tokyo’s Bunkyo ward for bottled water. She is worried and has a lot of questions.

Ms Hara, 39, is one of many in the Japanese capital who are unnerved by the news that traces of radioactive iodine-131 have been found in Tokyo’s drinking water, after the disaster at a quake-hit nuclear power plant to the northeast.

Officials said on Wednesday that the water was unsafe for babies, fuelling public safety fears and prompting the government to organise the distribution of bottled water to households with infants. But Ms Hara says that is not enough.

“I don’t know how to deal with this. When television started reporting the news about water, they had no analysis from experts,” Ms Hara said as she picked up her allotment of three 550-millilitre bottles.

“It was very, very scary.

“My family is worried. My husband and my mother-in-law have told me to drink bottled water and avoid tap water. So I am trying to do that to the extent I can,” said Ms Hara, who said she is breast-feeding her daughter.

“As the news developed, experts began to say there was no need to panic. So that eased my worries a little bit. But when you see people buying bottled water at stores and emptying store shelves, that makes you worry again.”

On Wednesday, the Tokyo city government said one water sample contained 210 becquerels of iodine-131 per kilogramme – more than double the legal limit for infants – but the level fell back to 79 in a test Thursday. The upper limits are 100 becquerels for infants and 300 for adults.

Other towns in Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures near Tokyo have also advised consumers not to drink tap water until further tests are carried out.

The iodine-131 – which has a half-life of eight days – entered the water supply after a series of explosions at the Fukushima plant, 250 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, sent radioactive material leaking into the air.

Japanese television networks ran hours of programming yesterday to answer parents’ questions on everything from whether the tainted water can be used to bathe children to whether they can use it to do laundry.

But environmental watchdog Greenpeace charged that the government was not doing enough to inform customers.

“The authorities may be trying to be brave about the current crisis by trying to avoid causing panic, but are they risking people’s health in the process?” Greenpeace energy campaigner Rianne Teule said in a statement.

A 27-year-old mother at the Bunkyo ward office with her five-month-old son said her friends and relatives were giving their children bottled juice for now to avoid consuming tap water. She is not sure what to believe.

“We just don’t know what we should worry about and what we shouldn’t worry about,” the woman, who asked not to be identified, said.