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from Photographers Blog:
Clinging to life in a tsunami zone
By Toru Hanai
Choufuku Ishisone of Miyako, Iwate prefecture, owns a convenience store.
On March 11, 2011, Ishisone was driving to see his store after checking on his house following the earthquake and saw a black tsunami wave roar over a seawall. He made a U-turn, but the tsunami struck him from multiple directions, sending his car afloat. The engine stopped. He jumped out of the car in a hurry but lost his footing in the tsunami and was swallowed up in the thick, black water.
He managed to avoid cars, ships and other debris carried by the tsunami but the water level continued to rise steadily. Grabbing onto a power line pole as he was swept past, he scrambled up so desperately that he was about five meters high before he knew it.
“I want to be saved! That one feeling kept me climbing,” he said. “Then I thought I had to get off the pole somehow, but the water didn’t go down, which was very irritating.”
It began to snow, chilling Ishisone, whose clothes were wet. As some three hours passed and it grew dark with no signs of rescue, Ishisone climbed down the pole and swam to a city office annex building. Finally he thought, “I’m safe.”
from Photographers Blog:
One year from that day
By Toru Hanai
It will soon be one year from that day - March 11, 2011.
Greetings among friends who meet after a long absence begins with, "Where and what were you doing on March 11?"
On March 11, 2011, I was photographing Prime Minister Naoto Kan during a committee session at the Parliament building in Tokyo.
from Full Focus:
Tsunami: Before and after
The moment when the tsunami struck Japan and the same view today.
from Photographers Blog:
Fukushima’s invisible fear
By Issei Kato
These days, a mask, protective clothing and radiation counter have all become a usual part of reporting trips, as essential as a camera, lenses and a laptop. Soon, this situation will have gone on for a full year.
The 20 km (12 mile) zone around Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is now a virtual ghost town after being evacuated of residents due to radiation. I asked a friend, who was forced by the disaster to leave the area and has been searching for a way to resume work, for help, and was able to enter the area where he used to live.
from Photographers Blog:
Risking life for school
By Beawiharta
On Wednesday morning I received an image on my twitter feed (@beawiharta). It was a photo from a local newspaper that showed a student crossing a river on a collapsed bridge. The picture caught me. I needed to find out where it was so I could go there to capture it.
Shortly afterwards I arrived at the office. I had forgotten about the collapsed bridge because we were very busy. I had two assignments for the day, a breast milk courier story and a story about Indonesia's rising investment rating. This was a big financial story because Moody’s ratings agency restored Indonesia debt to investment grade.
from Full Focus:
Fukushima silence
Buildings remain vacant and streets deserted inside the 20km (12 mile) radius exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The March 2011 tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems, leading to the world's worst atomic crisis in 25 years.
from Photographers Blog:
When December turns tragic
By Erik de Castro
December is normally a festive month in the Philippines with the Christmas season a big deal in this country of predominantly Roman Catholics. However, based on experience, heavy rains that can bring flash floods, landslides and lead to ferries sinking are also likely to happen during this period. For some Filipinos who have survived the worst kind of such disasters, December reminds them of the trauma they experienced.
Several villages in Cagayan de Oro City and Iligan City were caught flat-footed as they slept last Friday night when tropical storm Washi swept across Mindanao and Eastern Visayas, bringing strong winds and heavy rains that caused massive flooding, flash floods and landslides.
from Photographers Blog:
Nothing and no one between us
By Umit Bektas
At 13:41pm on Sunday, October 23 an earthquake measuring 7.2 magnitude hit the eastern Turkish province of Van. Minutes after the quake struck, first reports heralded large numbers of collapsed buildings with many people trapped under the debris. The first available flight to Van was on Monday so I decided to fly to Erzurum instead and from there take a four-hour drive to Van. When I arrived at Ercis, the town which had taken the brunt of the quake, it was just past midnight.
It was difficult in the dark to form a clear picture of the disaster and decide what to look for. I began to walk around the town. I photographed rescue workers making efforts to pluck people from under the rubble, but I could not spend more than a few minutes at each spot as I still had to get an overall picture. I had decided to look around for 45 minutes at the most before starting to transmit my first pictures. That was my plan until I came upon that one collapsed building.
from Photographers Blog:
Lessons from the floods
By Damir Sagolj
In the beginning it was business as usual. Children played in the water, women moved around on makeshift rafts and people ignored the rising water from the north of Thailand. There were lots of smiling faces and very few worried ones. Looking from the outside, one could say people were having fun and soon all would be forgotten.
Then, suddenly it was not fun any more. As the murky water rose and moved towards the capital it was obvious the scale of this year's floods would be something very few expected. The land of smiles turned into the land of worry, then anger.
from Oddly Enough Blog:
You got STUFF twirling in your head?
Okay, I'm sorry, I can't even begin to improve on this video clip.
In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain is asked whether he agreed with President Obama on Libya.
"Okay, Libya..." Cain says, like a sixth-grader pausing before spelling Mississippi. He adjusts a bottle of water for no apparent reason.
