Apart from radioactivity, there are chemicals, which were spread all over the region,

that should be measured in the coastal and terrestrial locations of tsunami hit areas. For example, the tsunami caused by the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake inundated a total area of approximately 470 km2 in Japan. The earthquake and the tsunami caused destruction or damage of 125,000 buildings, heavy damage to roads and railways. During these incidents many electrical generators were taken down. The waves swept away thousands of cars and other vehicles and flooded various buildings as they traveled inland. Some small towns in the tsunami hit areas were destroyed entirely, thus carrying away a variety of materials selleck chemical see more with them

and scattered them all over the tsunami hit areas. The degree and extent of damage was enormous and the worst affected coastal towns were left as only piles of rubble, with almost no parts of any structure left standing. Even some of the anti-tsunami seawalls collapsed. To date, there are trillions of pieces of composite rubble, comprising more than 25 million tons, are laying in the tsunami hit areas, waiting to be disposed of by the agencies involved in this job. The complexity of the waste to be disposed may pose a serious threat of environmental pollution, which should also be monitored along with the effects of nuclear disaster. Northern Japan, where the tsunami hit, has a cold

climate and almost all the buildings were built with wood and Tau-protein kinase cement and were invariably packed with variety of heat insulating materials containing flame retardants to keep the houses warm and also to prevent accidental fire. All these materials are now being inundated by seawater containing halide ions. All these wood and allied material are now soaked by seawater and even after drying they will contain enough chlorine and bromine to form chlorinated and brominated dioxins and related chemicals, if they are burnt under low temperature conditions. Along with these, large quantities of BFRs (brominated flame retardants) and other POPs chemicals like PCBs will also be released during such burning of waste. Such an enormous quantity of burnable material, if they can be segregated at all, cannot be handled by the high quality incinerator facilities, and this may lead to low temperature burning. The agencies involved in the disposal of these materials are now considering various means for doing this, but if this takes a long time, the public have to resort to open burning of the rubble around their destroyed houses, in small heaps. On the other hand, if these wastes can be land-filled at all, again there will be long lasting contamination of nearby aquatic and terrestrial environments, by leaching and land runoff of complex chemical mixtures.