Yesterday afternoon, when the earthquake hit, I was two steps up a rickety flight of stairs in an old warehouse in Remington, Virginia where we’re storing some of the many books we cannot fit into the charming, antique Virginia farmhouse we are currently inhabiting.
I thought someone must be opening an exceptionally violent garage door on the other side of the wall, then began guessing someone was running some piece of heavy machinery nearby in the building. The vibration stopped, and I proceeded upstairs.
I only learned that it was an earthquake when I got back to the car and turned on the radio.
WMAL, 63 AM, the station I listen to El Rushbo on, switched over to full-time broadcasting about this major news event. Sean Hannity never even came on. Instead, Conservative talk radio host Chris Plante was dragged out a pizzeria, where he had been lunching, back to the studio to cover what was essentially a non-event.
Chris and his associates interviewed all sorts of ordinary people, who testified to all of their personal earthquake experiences (typically just as interesting as mine).
My blood ran cold when Chris Plante, the conservative, proceeded in Pavlovian journalistic manner to interview a state legislator from Prince George County about “government’s response.” I would have said, in his position: “Response? What response? There was no actual damage. No injuries. There wasn’t anything anyone needed to do.” But, no. The politico happily bloviated on and on about how each and every level of government bureaucracy, all the “first responders” in particular, turned on every flashing light and siren, and spun their wheels vigorously. Our rulers, guardians, supervisors, and protectors had to justify their existence by seeming to take control, and keeping the rest of us alerted and informed, even if there was nothing in particular to alert us about, beyond potential heavy traffic resulting from government offices releasing their personnel to commute home early.
Even a conservative commentator, like Chris Plante, can be found to behave as a true product of the culture of journalism and officialdom, when push comes shove (even in the case of a minor 5.9 push), the journalist Plante goes running to Big Brother to participate in, and to cover with canine respect, the charade of official expertise gravely protecting us, the helpless public, from all perils and vissiscitudes, even in an instance where there is nothing but the empty semblance of a real event.
Bah, humbug!
Being engaged in something, kind of, sort of, resembling journalism myself, as you can see, I, too, felt obliged to cover the terrible earthquake of 2011, and here from BuzzFeed are 20 photographs of some of the worst damage.
The Herald Sun (Australia) reported the catastrophe:
It was certainly an expensive drop – more than $1 million worth of shiraz wine has gone down the drain after it was dropped by a malfunctioning forklift.
The 462 cases of 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz – at $185 a bottle – fell more than 6m to the ground as it was being loaded for export from Adelaide to the US.
The drop was so forceful, the bottles punched through the top of the cartons. Winemaker Sparky Marquis said the accident had cost him a third of his annual production.
“We just couldn’t believe it,” Mr Marquis said.
“This wine is our pride and joy, so to see it accidentally destroyed, and not consumed, has left us all a bit numb.”
There were additional hydrogen gas explosions in Units 1 and 3 and Unit 2’s containment may have been breached. (MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering – NSE)
Unit 2’s explosion damaged the suppression chamber and leaking oil caught fire and burned for two hours yesterday in Unit 4’s spent fuel pool. (NSE)
A small cadre of 50 (to 70) workers out of a staff of more than 800 made world-wide news by remaining behind to carry out “last defense” measures to control the reactors. Guardian — New York Times
The New York Times wonders if the Dust Bowl, the Johnstown Flood, and even the Lakeview Gusher might not have been worse.
I’d be inclined to nominate the New Madrid Earthquake of 1812, but I think the inevitable winner would have to be the 19th century California Hydraulic Mining for gold that moved millions of tons of earth, silted up entire river systems, washed away entire mountains, and rearranged the topography of a gigantic area of land permanently.
In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.
It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,†said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.
The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.
The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.
That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.
Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?
“My take,†said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.â€
The flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 obsessed the media and produced a storm of criticism for an insufficiently massive and rapid federal response that turned national opinion finally against George W. Bush, making him into a lame duck for the rest of his second term, and presaging democrat recovery of both Congress and the White House. The New Orleans flood was treated as terribly important.
Recently, the Cumberland River crested Monday at 51.9 feet, 12 feet above flood stage, spilling over its banks into the city of Nashville, Tennessee, flooding a historic downtown, producing billions of dollars in damages and killing at least 30 people. Meanwhile, national news coverage has focused instead on an oil spill in the Gulf which had not even yet reached shore, and a car bomb in Times Square that did not even explode.
Why the differences in perceived significance and coverage? Andrew Romano explains that it’s a herd thing. They all cover what everybody else covers and they have a seriously limited attention range.
As you may have heard, torrential downpours in the southeast flooded the Tennessee capital of Nashville over the weekend, lifting the Cumberland River 13 feet above flood stage, causing an estimated $1 billion in damage, and killing more than 30 people. It could wind up being one of the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history.
Or, on second thought, maybe you didn’t hear. With two other “disasters” dominating the headlines—the Times Square bombing attempt and the Gulf oil spill—the national media seems to largely to have ignored the plight of Music City since the flood waters began inundating its streets on Sunday. A cursory Google News search shows 8,390 hits for “Times Square bomb” and 13,800 for “BP oil spill.” “Nashville flood,” on the other hand, returns only 2,430 results—many of them local. As Betsy Phillips of the Nashville Scene writes, “it was mind-boggling to flip by CNN, MSNBC, and FOX on Sunday afternoon and see not one station even occasionally bringing their viewers footage of the flood, news of our people dying.”
So why the cold shoulder? I see two main reasons. First, the modern media may be more multifarious than ever, but they’re also remarkably monomaniacal. In a climate where chatter is constant and ubiquitous, newsworthiness now seems to be determined less by what’s most important than by what all those other media outlets are talking about the most. Sheer volume of coverage has become its own qualification for continued coverage. (Witness the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James saga.) In that sense, it’s easy to see why the press can’t seem to focus on more than one or two disasters at the same time. Everyone is talking about BP and Faisal Shahzad 24/7, the “thinking” goes. So there must not be anything else that’s as important to talk about. It’s a horrible feedback loop.
Of course, the media is also notorious for its ADD; no story goes on forever. Which brings us to the second reason the Nashville floods never gained much of a foothold in the national conversation: the “narrative” simply wasn’t as strong. Because it continually needs to fill the airwaves and the Internet with new content, 1,440 minutes a day, the media can only trade on a story’s novelty for a few hours, tops. It is new angles, new characters, and new chapters that keep a story alive for longer. The problem for Nashville was that both the gulf oil spill and the Times Square terror attempt are like the Russian novels of this 24/7 media culture, with all the plot twists and larger themes (energy, environment, terrorism, etc.) required to fuel the blogs and cable shows for weeks on end. What’s more, both stories have political hooks, which provide our increasingly politicized press (MSNBC, FOX News, blogs) with grist for the kind of arguments that further extend a story’s lifespan (Did Obama respond too slowly? Should we Mirandize terrorists?). The Nashville narrative wasn’t compelling enough to break the cycle, so the MSM just continued to blather on about BP and Shahzad.
WWII-era German propaganda poster depicting the Katyn Massacre
En route to a service commemorating the massacre at Katyn Forest of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet Union in 1940, Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and numerous members of the Polish government, everyone aboard the presidential plane perished in a crash near Smolensk.
Some wag at Lucianne.com has added the Obama logo to this famous picture
The famous photograph of the October 22, 1895 wreck of the Granville to Paris Express at the Montparnasse Station is becoming a popular metaphor for the hapless efforts by the Obama Administration and the democrat Congress to ram through a health care bill opposed by a significant national majority of the American people.
Finding he was several minutes late at the Paris conclusion of his 7-hour ten-minute run, Engineer Guillaume-Marie Pellerin decided to approach the Gare Montarnasse at cruising speed in an effort to make up time. He was relying on his auxiliary air-bakes to bring the locomotive safely to a halt, but the air-brakes failed. The locomotive brakes were not sufficient, and the engine proceeded out-of-control right through the buffer stop, jumping the tracks and driving 100 feet across the concourse, passing through the station wall and onto the terrace outside before falling 30 feet down onto the street below.
I can remember, oh, so well, just how much Peggy Noonan liked Barack Obama back in 2008. Well, things certainly have changed. This week, Peggy Noonan says that the presidency of Barack Obama is What a Disaster Looks Like, and she is applying to her former idol a very uncomplimentary light bulb joke.
Why, in 2009, create a new crisis over an important but secondary issue when we already have the Great Recession and two wars? Prudence and soundness of judgment are more greatly needed at the moment.
New presidents should never, ever, court any problem that isn’t already banging at the door. They should never summon trouble. Mr. Obama did, boldly, perhaps even madly. And this is perhaps the oddest thing about No Drama Obama: In his first year as president he created unneeded political drama, and wound up seen by many Americans not as the hero but the villain.
In Washington among sympathetic political hands (actually, most of them sound formerly sympathetic) you hear the word “intervention,” as in: “So-and-so tried an intervention with the president and it didn’t work.” So-and-so tried to tell him he’s in trouble with the public and must moderate, recalibrate, back off from health care. The end of the story is always that so-and-so got nowhere.
David Gergen a few weeks ago told the Financial Times the administration puts him in mind of the old joke: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”
Bill Quigley, at Huffington Post, says US actions “magnified the harm” caused by the earthquake in Haiti.
How’d we do that?
Well, as a rebellion was advancing on Haiti’s capital in 2004, the United States evacuated Jean-Bertrand Aristide to safety. (He later accused the United States of kidnapping him.) Relations between Aristide, the US, Canada, and Europe had been frosty since he gained power for the second time in 2000 via flagrant election fraud. Mr. Quigley obviously takes the view that stealing elections makes the winner “democratically elected.” (Hey! It works in Chicago.)
And he proceeds to attribute responsibility to the US for Haiti’s current woes, because the failure of the International Community and the Bush Administration to deliver financial support to a hostile socialist kleptocracy is obviously to blame for a shrunken public sector in Haiti.
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Danny Glover reaches even further: “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?â€
