Theme: A Disaster! Once, while taking a bus trip from Galesburg, Illinois to Columbus, Ohio, I overhead the people in the seats ahead of me rhapsodizing about the luxuries of train travel (especially as compared to a crammed greyhound bus where the passenger beside me took up her seat and half of mine.) "You can drink," one... Continue Reading →
When that tsunami is coming, you run...You protect yourself, you don't turn around, you don't go back to save anybody. You run for your life. - Jay Wilson, quoted in "The Really Big One" by Kathryn Schulz Growing up in the Midwest, weather has always been on my mind. Thunderstorms, straight-line winds, tornadoes, blizzards, ice storms... Continue Reading →
I have a memory of being very, very young and looking towards a distant Mount St. Helens, still smoking some ten years after its eruption. My impression at the time was that it looked awfully small. Returning to the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of 25 years, all of which was spent on the flat Midwestern cities... Continue Reading →
People are all rubberneckers at heart. Tragedy and horror are all part of the human experience; we look at disasters with conflicted hearts, knowing it’s important to chronicle the suffering and loss. We look for the seeds of human failure that lie at the heart of every disaster. We look because in part we want... Continue Reading →
A "molasses flood" sounds like something out of an old folksy proverb, as in "Tarnation! That girl is slower than a flood of molasses!" It sounds like a euphemism for something obscene, or the punchline to a bad joke. But a molasses flood is no joke. In fact, a molasses flood is downright deadly. In... Continue Reading →
I have a terrible obsession with disaster books. Whether they are natural or man-made, I read them. Train wrecks, plane crashes, fires, floods: as long as they lead to death, suffering, and sometimes cannibalism, I’m on board. I’m not going to parse the reasoning behind this particular obsession *mumbles lame excuse about survival preparation* but... Continue Reading →
