Nuclear Meltdown?
The plates of the earth shoved Japan with the force of an unprecedented earthquake that lifted the ocean floor causing a Tsunami wave that traveled at 600 miles an hour eastward across the Pacific where 6 and 8 foot high waves slammed into these Western United States.
People have been terrified, displaced, drowned, struck by falling debris, radiated, disabled and killed.
Yet Republican House Speaker John Boehner and his coterie of leaders, in disregard of the constitutional obligation to provide for the “general welfare,” intoxicated at the thought of slashing spending, insist on gutting $126 million out of the National Weather Service budget including the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said: “I hope my Republican colleagues in the House are now aware that there was a horrific earthquake and Tsunami in the Pacific.”
Nor is that the end of congressional insensitivity.
On February 22, 2011, 29 international humanitarian groups including Catholic Relief Services, the American Jewish World Service, and the International Rescue Committee told Speaker Boehner it was “shocking to imagine that in the next major global humanitarian crisis – the next Haiti, Tsunami, or Darfur – the United States might simply fail to show up.” The Speaker proposed in H.R. 1, a bill to cut “global disaster aid by 67%, global refugee assistance by 45%, and global food relief by 41%.”
A German philosopher once wrote that honor isn’t won; it’s only lost, and these members of Congress have dishonored themselves and this nation.
Consider, by contrast, that Robert Zoldos II, the Vice Mayor of Lovettsville, has been deployed as a Battalian Chief of a search and rescue team of 74 to go to Japan; he was last deployed to Port au Prince in 2010. This is what real patriots do when we allow them to serve.
We really should have learned something else from the explosion and possible meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear reactor – and it’s how fragile are the industry’s assurances of safety. In Japan, there were falsified safety records.
I’m not saying it could happen here the same way. But, as early as 1774, we had a “severe” earthquake in Richmond that covered 150,000 square kilometers. In 1828, the epicenter of another quake was southwest Virginia, so strong a shock that President John Quincy Adams wrote of it in his diary. There have been 10 other noteworthy quakes that spanned an expanse as large as 725,000 square kilometers. So don’t presume we can’t suffer a quake.
For the record, we have 104 reactors at 65 power plants across the nation and 4 of them are at two sites here in Virginia, North Anna (1,806 megawatts) in Louisa County and Surry (799 megawatts) in Surry County. We are playing with our health and safety as we can’t trust a thing these plants say.
In conclusion, this disaster reminds us again that no man is an island. More than a clod of earth has been washed away by the sea. Each of us is diminished by these deaths. But we have the opportunity to be involved in mankind and to make a difference - as Bob Zoldos already has in Japan.
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