Rescue 911
When my son was little in the 80s and early 90s, the whole family used to love the TV show “Rescue 911.” It was one of my guilty pleasures. A reality show that featured staged reenactments of actual 911 calls … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Disaster
Sad,…
…fascinating, but extremely chilling reading: what happened aboard Air France 447. And here’s an article written two years earlier by the same author, long before the black boxes for Air France 447 had been found. In it, he speculates on … Continue reading →
Irene: gone, but not forgotten
Hurricane Irene may be gone, but its aftermath isn’t. And although the effects were nowhere near as bad as originally predicted, for some communities they are still very bad indeed. Rivers are still rising in New Jersey. And landlocked Vermont—of … Continue reading →
Tornado in Springfield, MA
No part of the US is immune to tornadoes, although the well-known “Tornado Alley” in the midwest has by far the largest number in this country and the world. But New England has some, too, and yesterday Springfield, Massachusetts—a large … Continue reading →
Orphans of the storm
The devastating tornado in Joplin was especially devastating for a number of children who have been orphaned by it. The term “orphan” seems almost like an anachronism, something that was far more common in the past. And yet children are … Continue reading →
The effect of the Japan disaster
This AP article just may be the stupidest article on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that I’ve read so far. Anyone who never realized that industrialized, organized, complex nations are most vulnerable of all to such threats simply does not … Continue reading →
The tsunami: running for your life
We already know that being in the path of the tsunami was like a nightmare—the ocean coming swiftly to swallow you up along with everything in its path, inexorable, powerful, and deadly, and your only hope of survival to outrun … Continue reading →
Chernobyl and Fukushima: how do we define “disaster?”
We’ve been hearing the word “disaster” in connection with the nuclear reactors in Japan, usually in the context of phrases such as, “Japanese teams work mightily to avoid looming disaster.” But what is the definition of a disaster these days? … Continue reading →
More nuclear disaster talk
I think I’m starting to sound like the proverbial broken record (although now that records are pretty much obsolete, should there not be another term?), but the beat goes on with the hyping of the nuclear plant problems in Japan. … Continue reading →
Why is so much attention being paid to the nuclear reactor?
I’m not a scientist, but this article by William Tucker in the WSJ seems to make a great deal of sense and is worth quoting at length. The gist of it is that Fukushima Daiichi ain’t Chernobyl. Nor is it … Continue reading →
Japan: epicenter of disaster
There’s the quake, and then there’s the aftermath. Sometimes, as in Japan today, the latter is worse than the former. Not that the former wasn’t really really bad. It was, and it lasted for over two minutes. I’ve been in … Continue reading →
Apocalypse now?
The scenes on the television are surreal. Buildings and cars and trains and boats tossed around and floating in water like so many discarded toys in a flooded garbage dump. Fire. And now, a potential (or already partial) nuclear meltdown. … Continue reading →