kindergarten in a hotspot: tsunami stories (IV)

The following is an excerpt of a documentary I was recently asked to translate into English:

Kohriyama is home to Saint Paul's Kindergarten. The school is located in one of the city's so-called radioactive "hotspots."

School employees carry out decontamination efforts every single day. Both in the morning and in the evening, they break into teams to wash the entire school building. They also wipe down all surfaces inside the classrooms.

The children wear masks to school. Even the children understand that masks are helpful in avoiding contact with radioactive materials.

The high radiation levels at the school weren't discovered until more than a month after the nuclear meltdown. Inspectors from the Education ministry informed the kindergarten about the radiation amounts. The topsoil of the school grounds was immediately dug up and removed.

But no one would agree to dispose of the topsoil, so it sat in a pile in a corner of the school grounds.

Radiation measurements taken of the dirt pile were high enough to be reported in the news.

After searching for a solution to the disposal problem, the school finally decided to seal the contaminated dirt in thick rubber sheeting and bury it deep underground in an area next to the school.

Now that the dirt has been taken away, radiation levels on the school grounds are down to zero-point-three microsieverts.

For a while, requests from parents to take their children out of the kindergarten were increasing. But now that decontamination efforts have brought radiation levels down, the parents' anxiety has turned into a deepened sense of trust.

[The head of the kindergarten:] "For these children who can't leave and go somewhere else, I thought, how can we let them run around and play--how can we make sure they have a safe place to be? We've just got to clean things up and bring the levels down. That's basically the only thing I worry about every day.
We're fighting a horror that we can't see. If it had color we could wipe it up, or at least keep from touching it. If it had a bad smell we could go inside... But it's nothing like that. That's what makes it so scary."