The night before trash day in suburbia rarely brings such exciting visions as this Duchampian fountain on my neighbor’s curb. A tremendous storm–the first rain in many weeks–had just passed through, and the porcelain sparkled as if some great wet mythic meteorological Tidy Bowl Man had scoured everything clean.
In suburbia, on the night before trash day, the only sight more gratifying than a commode on the curb is three commodes on the curb:
The storm knocked over one of the toilets, shattering porcelain all over the road. The remaining johns stood silently by, two smooth white sentinels keeping watch over the night.
This last photograph below is a bit of a time lapse thing. Perhaps a bit too poetically, I titled it Never Returning, the Spirits Depart the Fountain. I don’t know what it means. Then again, I don’t know what three toilets on the street mean either. Dave?
All photos posted to Flickr by Sample Reality.
Tags: Flickr, Suburbia, toilets
August 30th, 2007
“The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we’ll be from the real thing…..There is no substitute for a planned simulation.” So says a character in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, as a midwestern town is overrun by men in Mylar suits, conducting a simulated evacuation from some vague chemical disaster.
Yesterday we had out own rehearsed disaster here at the McGuire Nuclear plant. Here is the official news release, sent via email to local residents:
On Tuesday, August 9, 2005 McGuire Nuclear Plant, Mecklenburg County Homeland Security, and regional first responder agencies will conduct a full-scale facility exercise to test the plant’s response systems as well as local resources and their capabilities in the event of an emergency. So if you live in Huntersville you may see more activity around the plant than normal, no worries. We will share the results after the event debriefing, take care, and be safe.
I had really wanted to go hang around the plant to see what a “full-scale” exercise looks like, but unfortunately I was out shopping. Nothing big, just some groceries–milk, cereal, whatever. Come to think of it, maybe my trip to the store was some sort of defense mechanisim. As Jack Gladney observes, once again in White Noise, “Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.”
The irony of it all is that the supermarket is, according to the email Duke sent out, likely more dangerous than a nuclear power plant. The email continues:
People have always been exposed to low levels of natural radiation. These levels provide a “background level” for comparison to exposures that occur from man-made sources. Basically, natural radiation is the result of cosmic rays from outer space and from radioactive materials in the earth. Man-made radiation comes from a variety of sources including medical and industrial uses, nuclear weapons testing, consumer products, and the nuclear power industry.
Damn those “consumer products”!!! I like how the email nestles this phrase in between the equally innocuous phrases “nuclear weapons testing” and “nuclear power industry.”
The good people at Duke Power then attached an informative graphic which details exactly how tiny a threat our neighborhood nuclear reactor poses (larger image):
What I love about this image is the juxtaposition of the Coleman lantern and the nuclear power plant. (Although, as I’ve mentioned before, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant looks disappointingly nothing like the towering nuclear plants of my childhood imagination, which is how the nuclear reactor appears in this image.)
This image informs me that natural background radiation is 300 times greater than the radiation released by a low-level nuclear waste storage facility. If that’s true, why is one of the lead stories in this morning newspapers the EPA’s announcement that the Yucca Mountain Facility in Nevada, where much of the nation’s nuclear waste is stored, should shield the outside world from radiation for 1,000,000 years? As most critics note, the one million years rule is a ruse to conceal the fact that the EPA is actually raising the allowable radiation limit for the first ten thousand years of those million years–the years that probably matter more to the Nevadan citizens living near Yucca Mountain.
Tags: danger, DeLillo, disaster, shopping, simulation, Suburbia
August 10th, 2005
I just can’t leave the nuclear power plant in my backyard alone.
I recently discovered a site from the Eyeball Series that lists formerly public FEMA information about McGuire Nuclear Power Station, information which was taken offline in the aftermath of 9/11.
The Eyeball site faithfully reproduces the FEMA information, which, according to what I’ve learned from TV shows like 24 and Alias, contains everything a terrorist needs to know to sabotage a heavily guarded nuclear plant.
As a bonus, the site posts a few high-resolution satellite images of the facility, so the terrorists can even find the parking lot with the best spaces.
Tags: danger, Suburbia, terrorism
August 7th, 2005
Here is a power transformer on my street, operated by Energy United, one of the two power companies in the area. (The other is Duke Power. I’d have to say that having their own nuclear reactor probably gives Duke some sort of competitive edge.)
This sign (larger image) gets right down to business, no subtlety here: “Can shock, burn, or cause death.” I love the illustration. It’s as if the box itself were attacking the stick figure human, hurling out lightning bolts from its innards.
On the Deadly Suburban Danger Sign Scale, this sign ranks high. Bonus Points for the ecumenical name, Energy United. Sounds a bit like some sort of European Football Club.
Tags: danger, Suburbia
May 23rd, 2005
