As a member of our Center for Investigative Action team I’ve been looking into the possibility of Fukashima fallout here on the West Coast. You’ve sent a lot of mail to me on the topic. Recent reports have also surfaced about radiation impacts to the Central Coast. In part two, I’ll show you how terribly the EPA’s RADnet monitors failed the Central Coast at the very time of the emergency in March/April 2011.
In part one, I told you that the Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to be the government's lead watchdog for monitoring air quality. In March and April, at the height of the Fukashima emergency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy were taking a lead role in the U.S. Government’s response to the impacts to our shores.
University of California Santa Cruz lecturer Dan Hirsch has been a radiation expert for over 40 years and said the EPA was getting usurped by these agencies. He said that was the first sign something was strange at the top of the response chain.
Beyond that, Hirsch warns that before there’s a rush to judgment over Fukashima fallout, do the science first. He maintains the radiation effects to us through eating fish are minimal -- maybe one in 100,000 cases.
In the days and weeks after the Fukashima meltdown in March of 2011, the EPA's reporting of radiation here on the central coast was sorely lacking, according to Hirsch.
3 photos that Hirsch shared tell this part of the story and are attached here. This Washington Post map shows the suspected path of the radioactive plume from Fukashima. Notice the plum was to hit on the central coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles in mid-March and April of 2011.
Now look at the map of the West Coast. The EPA has what they call "RADnet monitors." These test the air quality for radiation. The blue dots are the functional monitors at the time of the Fukashima accident.
The light blue dots are monitors that aren't working.
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