Category: Disastrous

Poor Japan

~ susie

Translated from the Japanese:

Japan’s Meteorological Agency on Friday warned the country’s 20 volcanoes have come alive due to the massive March 11 earthquake, and a study said an earthquake over 9.0-magnitude might hit Japan.

The Agency said volcanic explosions occurred after earthquakes several times in history and people should maintain vigilance against this tendency.

All for the want of a horseshoe nail

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

As Ron, the reader who sent me this asked, is it really cheaper not to pay for infrastructure? I wonder what it would have cost to fix the road. Maybe this young mom would be alive now:

(AP) MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The state of Alabama has paid $1 million to relatives of a South Carolina mother of two who was killed by a chunk of concrete from a pothole that flew through the windshield of a vehicle on a bumpy, crumbling section of Interstate 20 almost a year ago, officials said Thursday.

The family was paid even though they had never sued the state.

Two state officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the money was paid to compensate for the death of Jo Maureen Fisher in the freak accident, which occurred as the 33-year-old woman was traveling through the state with her husband and two young children on their way home to Goose Creek, S.C. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the settlement.

Following a review, the state’s Division of Risk Management made the payment for the Alabama Department of Transportation in a negotiated settlement with the family without any lawsuit or administrative claim being filed. State law limits such payments to a maximum of $1 million.

The state attorney general can approve such settlements when it’s obvious a lawsuit is inevitable and there’s a “serious risk” of the state losing, one of the officials told AP.

They’re fixing the road now. Better late than never, I guess.

Deja vu all over again

~ susie

In news all too reminiscent of the BP oil explosion, it looks like this nuclear crisis is going to drag on and on — thanks to a history of failing to meet safety standards and industry-friendly regulators:

The operator of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant said Saturday that highly radioactive water was leaking from a pit near a reactor into the ocean, which may partially explain the high levels of radioactivity that have been found in seawater off the coast.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it had detected an 8-inch crack in the concrete pit holding power cables near reactor No. 2 and was working to seal the fracture. Tepco said the water was coming directly from the reactor and the radiation level was 1,000 millisieverts an hour. The annual limit of radiation exposure allowed for Fukushima workers is 250 millisieverts.

Workers pumped cement into the shaft Saturday, but by the end of the day, the flow of water into the ocean had not diminished. Engineers speculated that the water was preventing the cement from setting, allowing it to be washed away.

Tepco officials said that on Sunday morning they would explore using a polymer — a type of quick-setting plastic — to plug the leak.

After spraying thousands of tons of water on the reactors at Fukushima over the last three weeks to keep the facility from overheating and releasing dangerous amounts of radiation over a wide area, the utility is faced with the problem of great volumes of contaminated water.

With storage tanks at the facility nearing capacity, Tepco is contemplating storing the water in a giant artificial floating island offshore, Kyodo news reported. Tepco, which has been monitoring radiation levels in seawater just offshore from the plant, said it would begin sampling about nine miles off the coast.

Workers have also been spraying the grounds of the plant with a polymer in an attempt to prevent any radioactive isotopes that have been deposited there from escaping from the vicinity of the plant. The polymer acts like a kind of super-glue, binding any contaminants to the soil so they cannot be blown away.

Meanwhile, here across the ocean, atomic forensics experts are piecing together the clues to figure out exactly what’s going on