SAMPLE REALITY » Suburbia

The readymades on my neighbor’s lawn; or, The ghost of Duchamp alights in North Carolina briefly and is gone.

Mark Sample — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:30:00 +0000

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.

This is a test, this is only a test.

Mark Sample — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 17:58:42 +0000

“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.

If you’re a terrorist and you’re reading this, then the terrorists have already won.

Mark Sample — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 22:17:31 +0000

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.

Warning!! Stay Indoors

Mark Sample — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 18:46:03 +0000

What Calendar is complete without evacuation plans?
(Larger Image)

Detail from the McGuire Emergency Planner
(Larger Image)

And here is more from my McGuire Emergency Planning Calendar, mailed by the nuclear family of Duke Power to every local resident just in case.

My very own evacuation strategy!

Three things I might be told to do? (1) Stay indoors (2) Run for the hills Evacuate (3) Take potassium iodide (KI).

Hmm, I think’s Option #2, all the way.

Warning!! Unusual Event!!

Mark Sample — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 05:21:54 +0000

Bonus page from the McGuire Nuclear Station
Emergency Planning Calendar (Larger Image)

Close up of the “Emergency Classifications”
(Larger Image)

My Emergency Planning Calendar from the local nuclear power plant includes many helpful reminders, such as:

Martin Luther King Day is January 17;
March 20 is the first day of spring;
Father’s Day is right around the corner on June 19;
July 5 sees the emergency siren test at 11:50 AM;
And “there are four classifications used to describe a nuclear station emergency” at McGuire.

On the right you can see these four classifications. I love the language Duke Power uses here, especially for the first order of emergency: “An Unusual Event.” According to Duke,

An Unusual Event is the least serious of the four classifications. It means there is a minor problem at the station. Because of strict federal regulations, a number of problems are reported as Unusual Events even though they pose no danger to the public.

First of all, do they have to capitalize the “U” and “E”? Any event becomes Unusual when capitalized!!

Secondly, I can’t help wondering whether these Unusual Events really “pose no danger to the public.” You’d think that after White Noise, in which an Airborne Toxic Event plays a major role, power companies would be wary of using the word “Event” to describe any, well, event.

Warning!! Emergency Planning Calendar!!

Mark Sample — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:18:12 +0000

Peaceful July in my monthly planner
(Larger Image)

Monthly planner?
I mean my McGuire Emergency Planning Calendar
(Larger Image)

Three Mile Island, courtesy of NARA
(Larger Image)

I know it’s not July yet, but I wanted to share this lovely photograph of a local watershed, found on the July page of a calendar that I received in the mail, free, a few months ago.

Who could be sending out these gorgeous free calendars to all the area residents? Why, Duke Power, of course.

I’ve already mentioned my friendly local nuclear power plant owned and operated by Duke Power. Merely as a friendly reminder that my neighbors and I should have our evacuation routes memorized, Duke mails these calendars out every year.

On the cover is a nice panoramic view of McGuire Nuclear Power Station. I’ve got to say, I’m not too impressed with those cooling towers. They’re short and squat, like smooshed grain silos. They’re nothing like the technologically sublime nuclear plants of my childhood, spewing steam from towering hourglass concrete structures.

Like, say, Three Mile Island.

Now that was a nuclear reactor. Incidentally, this oblique aerial photograph of TMI comes from President Carter’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island–whose report of the “accident” (i.e. your run-of-the-mill everyday partial core meltdown) is housed at the National Archives and Records Administration and mirrored on Stellar-One. I bet Metropolitan Edison, the operator of TMI back then, didn’t send out free calendars.

Suburbia: The Unspeakable Peril in the Everyday

Mark Sample — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 23:04:55 +0000

All this thinking about the dangers of suburbia reminds me of a passage from Joan Didion’s great 1970 novel Play It As It Lays. Maria Wyeth, the washed-up, strung-out actress in the novel exists in a near catatonic state.

For days during the rain she did not speak out loud or read a newspaper. She could not read newspapers because certain stories leapt at her from the page: the four-year-olds in the abandoned refrigerator, the tea party with Purex, the infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the playpen, the peril, unspeakable peril, in the everyday. (Play It As It Lays, pp. 99-100)

This peril in the everyday is the ghost anxiety that haunts many of the signs in my subdivision. Notice in how many of them children are at risk.

Because her own child is somehow brain damaged — and she aborts another fetus — Maria keys into this societal fear of children at risk. But she (ironically, considering her decidedly non-nurturing lifestyle) localizes the fear as a mother’s concern for her child, thereby depoliticizing what I see as a symptom of larger social anxieties:

She grew faint as the processions swept before her, the children alive when last scolded, dead when next seen, the children in the locked car burning, the little faces, helpless screams. The mothers were always reported to be under sedation. In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril. (Play It As It Lays, p. 100)

Instantaneous peril, or at least the imagined threat of instantaneous peril, what role does it play in our lives? In our decision-making? In our policies and politics, both locally, here in my own subdivision, and nationally, in an America where our greatest living enemy is supposedly some intangible capital-T Terror?

Warning!! Duke Power!!

Mark Sample — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 03:58:16 +0000

High Voltage in Suburbia (top)
and detail (bottom) (Larger Image)

Here’s a common sight in my neighborhood: a locked utility box. I’ve already posted on a similar box powered by Energy United. This one is Duke Power.

The warning is pretty straightforwardly lethal. The scary killer lightning windmill guy says it all.

I guess all these transformer boxes are a result of the electrical wiring for the subdivision being hidden, buried underground. In the neighborhood where I grew up (which we called an allotment–it wasn’t until college that I encountered the word “subdivision”), all the power cables were strung on telephone poles running alongside the streets. Not as pretty as them being, well, not there, but it definitely gave the birds a place to hang out.

Warning!! Playground Jungle Gym!!

Mark Sample — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 04:20:57 +0000

Playground Jungle Gym (Larger Image)
Posted to Flickr by samplereality.

Continuing my series of posts on Danger in Suburbia, I want to highlight another lurking horror on the playground in my subdivision. Here is a sturdy metal and PVC slide/tunnel jungle gym, with a warning sticker posted in several places on the equipment: “Warning: Installation…may result in serious injury or death…” [Original sticker text edited for brevity and shock value.]

Any warning with “death” in it definitely ranks high on the Suburban Danger scale.

Terror hides everywhere. No wonder we declared war on it.

Warning!! Playground Swing Seat

Mark Sample — Thu, 26 May 2005 21:27:59 +0000

Playground Swing Seat (Larger Image)
Posted to Flickr by samplereality.

There’s a playground around the corner in my subdivision, and it’s loaded with warning signs. There’s even one on the toddler swing seat, alerting all who read that “improper installation, maintenance, use, or vandalism can damage seat and lead to serious injury.”

What I find intriguing about this sensible sign is that it speaks to all sorts of people at once: the workers who installed the swing, the crews who maintain the parks, the parents and children who use the swings, and the teen pranksters who vandalize such parks. All are addressed in a single, leveling sentence. And it’s punctuated, without a trace of irony, with the phrase “Made in the U.S.A.”

So, “serious injury”–especially to a child on a seemingly harmless swing–that ranks high on the Deadly Suburban Danger Sign Scale, maybe all the up to Code Orange.

As an added bonus, I’ve geotagged this sign: N 35° 29.42390′ W 80° 49.60180′

Update: Looking back at the photograph of the swing seat, I realize that it looks awfully a lot like a pair of worn, dirty, stiff underwear. I guess that adds a whole other dimension to the warning on the swing.

SAMPLE REALITY » Suburbia

The readymades on my neighbor’s lawn; or, The ghost of Duchamp alights in North Carolina briefly and is gone.

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