But worse was to come.
From The Age :
In Kesennuma, fire had replaced the waves as the principal source of danger on Saturday night.
Blazes that began amid the chaos wrought by the tsunami were spreading out of control. Night-time aerial footage showed huge tracts of the city, home to 74,000 people, engulfed in flames.
Witnesses said the fires began after the tsunami hit an oil tanker at the port. The flames then spread inland along the river towards the city centre.
Local news agencies reported that a third of the city had been completely submerged in mud and fires continued to rage in the rubble and debris.
This is very sad, at least the earthquake is a natural disaster, caused by the globel warming, so it is not so "natural" but the radiation caused by the reactors, can kill people in 2 days as long, is this gonna be the next chernobyl ? another phantom town ?
ReplyDeleteNo, the reactors gave people plenty of time to run away. And last I heard, the amount of radiation released is still quite small.
ReplyDeleteSo far, the chemicals released by floodwater sweeping through a city are likely to be more damaging than the radiation. Some chemicals are mutagens and stay in the environment a very long time.
And that's not even counting the burning oil refineries, which are likely to do a lot more environmental damage than the reactors.
Yes, nuclear power is dangerous, but fossil fuel burning kills a million people a year. These reactors aren't packed with graphite - they won't burn like Chernobyl did.
And even Chernobyl killed and injured a lot fewer people than the Bhopal gas leak.
Am I in favor of nuclear power? Only in so far as it displaces coal power... which is to say... yes.
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