Two workers injured at Edagawa materials yard; removal operation begins with no subject identified
Two men working the night shift at a materials yard in Edagawa were injured around 11 p.m. on Aug. 30, one of them seriously. From traces at the scene, the TDA's biological management division judged a contact incident with a drift organism likely and began a joint removal operation with police. The subject has not been sighted; the area including the yard is sealed.
Two men were inspecting the gaps between stacked materials, the division said. They worked in a team of three, with one man remaining in the gatehouse. The injured are in their 40s and 50s; the younger man, with serious injuries to an arm and his chest, has been hospitalized. The other was treated for light injuries and went home the same night. The emergency call came at 11:08 p.m.
"The sound came first," said the colleague who was in the gatehouse. "I thought a pile was collapsing, and when I turned around they were both down. Something seemed to move behind the load, but it was dark and I can't say. When I started to run over, one of them shouted at me not to come." Both injured men say they saw nothing. The yard has only two fixed lights, near the entrance; the back sections are inspected with portable floodlights carried in.
At the scene were gnaw marks on timber and resin-clad materials, concentrated between about 40 centimeters and one meter above the ground, and several places where the crushed-stone surface had been turned over to a depth of some 20 centimeters. Neither matches the traces of any known designated drift species, the division said: "We have confirmed neither the species nor the number of individuals." Analysis of residues is expected to take several days. The removal operation will continue until the subject is identified.
In the early hours of the same day, the division carried out a nighttime removal operation in the bayside warehouse district, where a security guard was attacked (previously reported). On any link between the two, it said: "The distance is about three kilometers. At this point a connection can be neither asserted nor ruled out." It is the first time since the framework was established that two removal operations have run in parallel on one day.
The closure covers about 400 meters of municipal road along the canal, with night traffic restricted for the time being. The ward has put up detour signs at nine points, and one bus route has been diverted.
Businesses in the area received a written request to avoid solitary work after dark. The notice is a single page: roll call before work, movement in pairs or larger groups, floodlights carried at all times. It ends: "If you hear an unfamiliar sound, do not go to confirm it; leave the area."
A haulage worker, 52, said the shoulder where he always parked while waiting for a dispatch is now inside the tape. "It was quiet there, good for a nap. Now the quiet bothers me a little." A nearby lunchbox shop has suspended late-night trading. "We made the night-shift orders in one batch — that's thirty percent of our takings," the owner, 48, said. "But that's the hour my son does the deliveries."
The construction-materials company that runs the yard says the nightly inspection has always been about shifted loads and theft. It has suspended night inspections for now and posted a single guard at the entrance. "Thirty years, and never once a story about something being here at night," a manager said. "This was not that kind of place."
The sealed zone faces a residential district across the canal. The ward board of education has told two schools within about 600 meters of the perimeter, including Edagawa Metropolitan High School, to send club activities home an hour earlier for the time being. The school is due to make its first appearance in the autumn student wall-racing qualifiers opening Sept. 5. "We'll move practice to the morning," its captain said. "The wall is drier in the morning anyway."
A removal operation is the administrative term for the joint response by the division and police to a designated drift species confirmed to be dangerous, and is in principle conducted in daylight. This one invokes the clause covering cases where injury has already occurred and the subject's movement risks widening the harm. No date has been set for lifting the closure. Outside the site on the morning of the 31st, a division official told reporters: "Nobody has seen the subject yet." Asked for an outlook, he did not answer it, saying only: "It will continue."
