They were not wearing boots at the time and therefore their feet were soaked in the water.

This gets weirder and weirder. You wouldn't expect someone on an ordinary building site to be bootless - never mind someone in the bowels of a potentially lethal ruined nuclear site.

''Because of this, the workers were believed to have continued their work even after their dosimeters' alarm went off, assuming a problem with the machine,'' a TEPCO official said.

Huh? All three alarms must have gone off - and they ignored them?

This sounds like barefaced lying to me. Whatever the real story is, I doubt it has much in common with the official version.