Survivor pulled from rubble after eight days

Associated Press

TOKYO

Military search teams pulled a young man from a crushed house today, eight days after an earthquake and tsunami wrecked northeast Japan.

The young man, found in the rubble in Kesennuma city, was too weak to talk and immediately was transferred to a nearby hospital, said a military official.

The Japanese government conceded Friday it was slow to respond to the disaster and welcomed ever-growing help from the United States in hopes of preventing a complete meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant.

The entire world was on alert, watching for any evidence of dangerous spikes in radioactivity spreading from the six-reactor facility, or that damage to the Japanese economy might send ripple effects around the globe.

As day broke today, steam rose from Unit 3, an unwelcome development if not a new one that signaled continuing problems. Emergency crews faced two continuing challenges at the plant: cooling the nuclear fuel in reactors where energy is generated and cooling the adjacent pools where thousands of used nuclear-fuel rods are stored in water.

“In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Friday.

Crucial to the effort to regain control over the plant is laying a new power line to the complex, allowing operators to restore cooling systems. Tokyo Electric said it has brought the cable to the plant and was expected today to try to connect it to the facility’s Unit 2; the utility already has missed a Thursday deadline to do that.

The government raised the accident classification for the nuclear crisis from Level 4 to Level 5 on a seven-level international scale.