这是一篇来自于英国电讯报的关于日本地震核泄漏的雅思阅读材料。这篇雅思阅读材料的主要内容是日本民众正想尽一切办法逃离地震带来的核泄漏可能危险的区域。那么究竟是一种什么样的情形呢?下面是详细内容。

　　Japan earthquake: residents flee as quake fears spread

　　The railway station at Nasushiobara, the last one still operating near Japan's nuclear crisis area, was jammed with frightened people. In this ghost town of closed shops and offices, pedestrian-free pavements, and empty petrol pumps, the station was the only place still alive, and the only escape route that most had left.

　　The Tokyo highway a mile to the west was busy, too – but you needed a lot of petrol to get to Tokyo. At the only garage which still had it, there was a five-hour queue. With radiation now leaking from the stricken plant just down the road, there might not be five hours to spare.

　　From the town and the whole surrounding region, on foot, by bicycle and using the last fuel in their tanks, the people came to the railway station, a river turning into a flood as word spread of just how serious the danger now was.

　　"I couldn't sleep and I was watching TV," said Noriyuki Fukada, an English teacher. "Then it was announced that there would be a government statement at 6.30. I thought, if the government announces something at 6.30am, it cannot be good."

　　It wasn't. Radioactive fuel rods in one of the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactors, the official spokesman admitted, were now "fully exposed", at risk of meltdown, and radiation had escaped into the atmosphere. Ninety per cent of the plant's own staff were evacuated, leaving only a skeleton team fighting off catastrophe. Most serious of all, an explosion the previous day – the plant's third – might have damaged a reactor containment vessel.

　　The containment vessels are the last barriers between the reactors' cores and the outside world, the very things the government has spent the last several days promising will protect us. A few hours later, the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, appeared on television.

　　"Now we are talking about levels [of leakage] that can impact human health. I would like all of you to embrace this information calmly," he said. But the beads of sweat were clearly visible on his own brow.

　　By that point, however, I, and a good part of the population of the district around Koriyama, the major town closest to the stricken plant, were getting out. Mr Edano was telling us to stay indoors and keep our windows closed. But old habits of deference to authority were breaking down after days of conflicting and partial information, evacuations and evasions. Many were taking matters into their own hands.