Navy sailor Lindsay Cooper knew something was wrong when billows of metallic-tasting snow began drifting over USS Ronald Reagan.
“I was standing on the flight deck, and we felt this warm gust of air,
and, suddenly, it was snowing,” Cooper recalled of the day in March 2011
when she and scores of crewmates watched a sudden storm blow toward
them from the tsunami-torn coast of Fukushima, Japan.
The tall 24-year-old with a winning smile didn’t know it then, but the
snow was caused by the freezing Pacific air mixing with a plume of
radioactive steam from the city’s shattered nuclear reactor.
Now, nearly three years after their deployment on a humanitarian mission
to Japan’s ravaged coast, Cooper and scores of her fellow crew members
on the aircraft carrier and a half-dozen other support ships are
battling cancers, thyroid disease, uterine bleeding and other ailments.
“We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!’ ” Cooper recalled. “I took pictures and video.”
But now “my thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds
in one month and then gain it back the next,” said Cooper, fighting
tears. “My menstrual cycle lasts for six months at a time, and I cannot
get pregnant. It’s ruined me.”
The fallout of those four days spent off the Fukushima coast has been tragic to many of the 5,000 sailors who were there.
At least 70 have been stricken with some form of radiation sickness, and
of those, “at least half . . . are suffering from some form of cancer,”
their lawyer, Paul Garner, told The Post Saturday.
“We’re seeing leukemia, testicular cancer and unremitting gynecological
bleeding requiring transfusions and other intervention,” said Garner,
who is representing 51 crew members suing the Tokyo Electric Power Co.,
which operates the Fukushima Daiichi energy plant.
Read the rest here.