I Think God is Mad at Japan
Yet another incident of Japan getting raped by the weather.
The landfall of Typhoon 12 (aka Tropical Cyclone Talas) has seen parts of Japan subject to severe flooding, with scenes of inundation reminiscent of the tsunami which devastated Fukushima earlier in the year – although at least this time there was fair warning and only two fatalities so far.
The top of a signpost:
A rather striking picture of a government river monitoring website’s efforts to cope with the water levels:
NHK provides details:
A severe tropical storm is heading north after making landfall on Japan’s southwestern island of Shikoku on Saturday morning.
The Meteorological Agency says tropical storm Talas is moving slowly north over Shikoku.
It has an atmospheric pressure of 982 hectopascals at its center and winds of up to 108 kilometers per hour.
The storm is bringing record heavy rain to western and eastern Japan.
In Kami-kitayama Village, Nara Prefecture, over 115 centimeters of rain has fallen since Tuesday.
Daisen in Tottori Prefecture has recorded more than 80 centimeters of rain and areas along mountains in Shikoku have received 80 centimeters.
Mountainous areas in Tokai and north of the Kanto region had more than 60 centimeters of rain.
Weather officials say the storm will retain strength and keep moving north, and is expected to reach the Sea of Japan coast late on Saturday night.
NHK has learned that Talas left two persons dead, 5 missing, and 47 others injured.
Authorities across the nation issued evacuation orders and advisories for more than 28,000 households, warning against swollen rivers and mudslides.
courtesy of sankakucomplex
Reactor Worker Leukemia Death “Nothing To Do With Us!”
The operators of the ruined reactors at Fukushima are under fire for claiming that the recent death of one of their reactor cleanup workers from cancer of the blood had “nothing to do with” his work amidst the radioactive ruins of the plant and that they have “no plans” to investigate it further.
Tepco recently announced the contract worker, in his forties and involved in radiation control work at the plant for a week in early August, died suddenly in the middle of the month from acute leukemia, shortly after finishing work at the plant.
Tepco claims that “according to a doctor’s diagnosis, his work had nothing to do with his cause of death” and states that “we have no plans to undertake any further investigation of his death.”
He was said to be exposed to 0.5 millisieverts of radiation during his work at the plant, 10% of the annual limit.
They say they have no idea what he had been doing before coming to work at the plant, and that they found no sign of the disease when they checked his health prior to sending him to work.
Leukemia normally develops over years rather than days, supporting Tepco’s assertions – although this would instead suggest Tepco sent a cancer sufferer in the terminal stages of the disease to work in a nuclear disaster area.
Japanese doctors have noted a much higher long-term incidence of leukemia amongst plant workers than chance would suggest likely.
Tepco has been criticised both before and during the crisis for using ultra short-term contract workers to undertake maintenance work at the plant, rotating them out of the plant as soon as their radiation exposure reaches legal limits.
Some have claimed this allowed them to maintain much laxer radiation safety standards than would have been the case if they were irradiating their own permanent employees.
Supposedly there have been no deaths directly caused by the events at Fukushima, although a number of indirect deaths (suicides by bankrupted farmers and so on) have been recorded, and the sheer amount of radiation released seems likely to at least cause many life-shortening illnesses.
Cited from http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2011/08/31/reactor-worker-leukemia-death-nothing-to-do-with-us/
So apparently radiation does one of two thing. It either causes cancer or cures cancer. I say if he stayed at work he would have at least had a better chance of survival.
let it snow, let it snow, let it ice pebbles?
What can I say but it “snowed” here in Fayetteville on Fri. night. Well… I guess snow isn’t the right word considering it was the consistency of a premade snow cone. I call it snow pebbles. If there is one thing wrong about Fayetteville it’s the weather. We are about an hour south of Raleigh North Carolina and the one thing it almost never does here is snow, and when it does, it does it the wrong way. I.e. snow pebbles. I personally think there is a curse on Fayetteville. If you go to the city border you will see snow on the other side but not on the city side.lol. Anyway it snowed this weekend. The next day it decided to heat back up a little and turned everything to ice. Yay ice. Well I live on a cul-de-sac. Which was completely iced over. Luckily one of my friends, josh, was staying over. So we found an old clothes basket with a rounded bottom and threw each other around on the ice. After that we let out one of my dogs, her name is toes, and called her between the two of us and watched her slip around on the ice. The next day “today” the 1st of Feb. most everything has melted except for stuff in the shadows which is now even harder ice. Well… I work at night and at an apartment complex. This apartment complex has a hill behind the apartments and so I was sliding down the hill. It was fun. But my supervisor saw me and said “Why are you the only one working that’s able to have fun in weather like this?” idk. I just do. According to the forecast it is supposed to snow next weekend and the weekend after that also. “I can only hope!”
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