photo: a wing and a prayer
Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember.
It is there that I [...]
Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Google has added high-resolution satellite photos of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the abandoned town of Pripyat.
Above is the plant; the damaged reactor is on the left. In Pripyat, the ghostly ferris wheel was easy to find, but where’s the vehicle graveyard? Update: here it is. [...]
Twenty years ago today at 1:23:44, the Chernobyl NPP reactor number four exploded. Five thousand tons of lead, sand, and other materials were dropped on the resulting fire in an attempt to stop the spread of the radioactive cloud. The world learned of the accident when Western European nuclear facilities identified radiation anomalies and traced [...]
Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month’s National Geographic Magazine tells of the “long shadow of Chernobyl” — grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while some elderly residents return to their old homes inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated “exclusion zone.” The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the “red forest” — so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed — are beginning to grow back now. But the multimedia companion materials tell a somewhat more morose tale.
The good people at Keep the Faye gave me a chuckle with their series of choose you daily disaster magnets, like the hillbillies and volcano series pictures above. Then they followed it up with the amusing, but somewhat less funny choose your favorite fantasy series.
keep the faye, magnet, refrigerator magnets, funny, choose your daily disaster, [...]
DefenseTech’s Noah Shachtman writes:
Organizing thousands and thousands of people, in hellish conditions and in a hurry, is tough work. Let’s take that as a given. But still: We’re now a work week into a natural disaster that had been forecast for years, and New Orleans “is being run by thugs,” the city’s emergency [...]
I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen many images of the flooding in New Orleans until I found these. Amazingly, The Times Picayune is publishing PDF editions during disaster. The hurricane and flood damage are truly scary, but the worst news is on page five, which tells of widespread looting:
Law enforcement efforts to contain [...]
Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like [...]
update: there’s more pictures, even some video (look for links marked with the QuickTime logo), and a bundle more nuclear and Chernobyl-related stories.
I almost fell into a trap that has snared quite a few before me. bookofjoe recently pointed to the story of Elena, a motorcycle riding woman who claimed to brave the radiation [...]
I just got IM’d by my friend Karen. Her sister got married this past weekend and they were all in New Hampshire for the event. Here’s the transcript:
hi - sooooo sorry we did not call
the wedding was insane
everything kept going wrong
all weekend
I didn’t really expect you to call.Not that I didn’t want to see [...]
