The military airdrops of seawater onto the Fukushima Daiichi plant continued throughout the day today, and Tokyo Electric Power Co. was nearing completion on a new power line that would restore the cooling systems in the reactors. The outlook remains bleak after a week of crisis, but Japanese officials appear to have settled on a [...]

They don’t bring out Japan’s head of state for just any reason. Japan’s Emperor Akihito has said he is “deeply worried” about the crisis his country is facing following last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami. In an extremely rare appearance, the emperor went on live TV to make his first public comments on the disaster, and [...]

I’m sure the rolling updates here at FDL will continue on the Japanese disaster and in particular the nuclear crisis, but so much has occurred overnight that I thought I’d take a stab at it. Here’s what we know at the moment: • This New York Times story gave a lot of people nightmares before [...]

We have plenty of people here at FDL to give you the technical explanations about what is happening at the Japanese nuclear plants right now. I’m here to give you the spin. The nuclear industry’s spin. The most striking claim made by NEI spokesman Mitchell Singer: Americans should be “reassured” by the crisis unfolding in [...]

This interactive map from the New York Times of key cities in Japan before and after the earthquake and tsunami is one of the more horrifying things I’ve seen in recent memory. You can scroll the bar back and forth and just see towns eaten alive by the onrush of water. I think we’re only [...]

The destruction in Japan from today’s earthquake, apparently the largest in 1,200 years, is almost indescribable. The last I heard was that as many as 88,000 Japanese are unaccounted for. The official death toll so far is in the hundreds, but that’s sure to rise. And another fairly large earthquake – not an aftershock, a [...]

It looks like the Atlantic Coast has, so far, dodged a bullet. Hurricane Earl passed by North Carolina’s Outer Banks last night and this morning, delivering a glancing blow. North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue reported no injuries from the tropical storm-force they saw. The path of the hurricane, which has degraded to a Category 2, [...]

The best-case scenario for Hurricane Earl was that it would move out to sea and only affect the eastern seaboard with rip currents and maybe a slight sprinkling of rain. But the storm appears to have pushed enough to the west to now threaten parts of the East Coast with much more than that. As [...]

As predicted by meteorologists, Hurricane Earl, now at Category 4 strength, has now turned north and west from Puerto Rico and remains on track to slam into the Eastern seaboard. It could increase in wind speed over the open Atlantic, which means it could be a pretty large storm by the time it reaches the [...]

Maybe I’m just sensitive because I worked on the show whose video you see above (I didn’t edit the NYC hurricane episode you see above, but some other episodes). But the trajectory of the hypothetical storm “off the coast of Florida” which “turned and headed north overnight,” touching down in Manhattan on a “sunny September [...]

The headline here, “U.S. sets example by pledging $60M more to U.N. for Pakistani flood aid,” is a bit too precious, but it’s true that the United States has stepped up their relief aid to $150 million dollars for the tragic events in Pakistan, and that they hope others will follow suit. The U.S. pledge [...]