AP Enterprise: Nuke Evacuation Fatal for Old, Sick The doctors and nurses at Futaba Hospital pleaded for help as a radioactive plume wafted over their hospital. They had been ordered out but had no vehicles to evacuate the hundreds of patients in their care. After two days of waiting in the cold with no electricity, help finally came. Nearly two dozen patients died in the chaotic, daylong odyssey that followed. Japan's government says only one person, an overworked employee at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, died as a result of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. But one year later, details from a new report and interviews with local authorities show many more perished because of bad planning and miscommunication between government agencies. In fact, if the calamities that unfolded on March 11, 2011, were to be repeated today, hundreds of thousands of lives would still be at risk, according to mayors, hospital administrators and disaster response officials interviewed by The Associated Press. They say little has been done to fix systemic planning shortfalls and communication problems between government agencies that compounded that day's horrors. "We have set a terrible precedent for the rest of the nation and for any town in the world where nuclear plants are located," said Katsutaka Idokawa, the mayor of Futaba, one of two towns straddled by the devastated Fukushima facility. I see this disaster as a meltdown of Japan itself. FILE - In this March 19, 2011, an elderly evacuee is carried in on a wheelchair to an evacuation center in Yokohama, near Tokyo, from the Fukujuen home for the eldery, in Minami Soma, a city partially in the 12-miles (20-kilometer) no-go zone from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The home's 96 residents were evacuated to Yokohama as they ran out of medicine and faced starvation, according to the home's director, Masahiro Sakashita. One of them also died on the bus, and two others fell seriously ill. Akinori Kahata, a nuclear disaster management official at Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said the government was reviewing its contingency plans - extending the regulations to cover up to 18 miles (30 kilometers) from a nuclear plant - because of the problems with the Fukushima evacuation, particularly with hospitalized and handicapped people. But officials in several towns around Japan where nuclear plants are located told the AP that they are not confident their emergency plans would work any better than Fukushima's. They say it could take months and require a complete re-examination of how to approach evacuations for significant improvements to be made. The breakdown in Japan's crisis response was most striking in the evacuation of Fukushima's sick and elderly. According to a 400-page report released last month by the Independent Fact-Finding Committee on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident - a panel of scholars, lawyers and industry experts - 784 patients were evacuated from six Fukushima hospitals within the 12-mile (20-kilometer) no-go area. Of 435 at Futaba Hospital and a related senior care center, 21 died either in buses en route to evacuation centers, or in the centers themselves, before they could be admitted to another medical facility. Jin Ishida's grandfather was one of them. Ishida, who is in charge of crisis management in Okuma, which is adjacent to Futaba and also hosts part of the Fukushima nuclear plant, said the disaster overwhelmed local authorities. "It was complete chaos," he said. We were not prepared. We had no protection, no protective gear, no experts. Our communication lines were disrupted, our phone lines were clogged by a flood of incoming calls. We didn't have contingency plans for hospitals - even the firefighters didn't have a plan.