Tag Archives: tragedy

Lies about the Boston Bombing

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Conspiracy theories about the Boston bombing continue to be posted today.

Please don’t be gullible enough to fall for this stuff, folks–anyone who claims to know what happened at this point is not being truthful.

Many of these claims are ridiculous and easily debunked. Others aren’t as obviously false, but still don’t pass the smell test –a claim about an eight-year-old supposedly running a marathon in which children are not allowed to run, for example, or a picture of a woman killed at Sandy Hook that’s been manipulated by a photo program and incorrectly labelled as a Boston bombing survivor.

If something seems fishy, just don’t pass it on until you are sure, especially if it comes from an unknown or an single-agenda-driven source.

Please do not spread lies.

Here are five viral stories about the bombing that are not true. In any event like this you are going to get untrue stories, partly because initial reports later turn out to be untrue. That’s normal. Just make sure you read the followup reports, too.

Evil, Good, and the Boston Bombing

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I realize that I’m about to anger a lot of people right now, but I saw a few things about the Boston bombing last night on social media that were upsetting, not just to me, but to others as well.

And these are just my opinions. They don’t reflect anyone else’s, nor my company’s opinions.

Also, I must note, anybody is allowed to say whatever they want. Freedom of speech is important. However, just because you can say something does not mean you should, especially not in the immediate wake of a horrific event. Why not wait a day or two?

People were saying these things long before the death toll was known and long before others could find out if their loved ones were still alive, with intact limbs. They could have waited 24 hours for families to be notified of death and maimings.

Why not wait a day or two? Think it over from the victims’ point of view, and then if you still think it’s important enough to post, and unlikely to hurt someone, post it then.

1. It is totally inappropriate to immediately use the bombing to make snide remarks about guns, whether you are pro-gun or anti-gun or in between and ambivalent.

In the immediate wake of a massive epidemic of ebola that killed three people, you wouldn’t be posting things about how “Well this goes to show that measles is/is not totally harmless,” would you? (It isn’t, by the way. Measles can and does kill and maim people on a fairly regular basis. But that’s beside the point.)

2. It is totally inappropriate to immediately be claiming these people were actors, or that the government did it, or any other conspiracy theory about the bombing.

The plain fact is, at this time no reputable information has been released about who did it, and much of the other conspiracy talk is actually garbage, easily debunked for those who take 10 seconds to check Snopes.com.

I do think it is particularly awful to accuse actual victims of being actors. I talked to several people who were either there themselves or had relatives there yesterday. They’re real people and they were really frightened. And real people have lost their lives or their limbs to this bombing.

3. People were also posting graphic images on Facebook, of blood-strewn streets. That’s fine with me, but it’s not fine with everybody–there are some very squeamish people out there, and again, this was long before everyone knew their relatives were safe. And the phones were shut down for a long time too, so they couldn’t necessarily check.

How would you like to be looking at a photo of a bloody street and wondering if that blood or limb is your daughter’s or husband’s? It doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?

All that said, there’s a nice Mr. Rogers meme going around Facebook right now about how whenever something terrible happens, people try to help, and that you will always find helpers. I’ve seen a few stories about the helpers already, and will be collecting them here.

Boston Marathon explosions attract an outpouring of help from city’s residents

Overwhelming kindness follows Boston Marathon blast

The good outnumber you

How A Decade Of Disasters Helped Boston Hospitals Handle The Marathon Bombings

IRS extends tax deadline for Boston bombing victims

Canadian runners lace up to show support for victims of Boston Marathon bombings

Athletes Going the Extra Mile to Support Boston Marathon Bombing Victims

How to help after Boston Marathon bombing: Relief funds spring up

Poisoning Children: Some Horrible History

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Pardon the sensationalism in the title of this post, but be assured that it is accurate. I am writing about a tragedy in which a company made poisonous cough syrup, killed children, and largely, got away with it.

More than 100 people were killed, back before companies had to safety test their formula before putting them on the market.

It was 1937, and the deaths and the scandal prompted reform of the laws regulating medicine and cosmetics, requiring companies to perform animal testing and to send the results to the FDA before sales.

The whole sordid, tragic tale can be found here, on Speakeasy Science, a blog which I heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the history of science. A shorter take on the elixir sulfanilimide tragedy can be found on Wikipedia.

Critically, however, the same poisonous substance in the cough syrup has sickened and killed people many times since. It’s a sweet-tasting organic compound called diethylene glycol, and it’s been responsible for a number of poisonings, as recently as 2008.

Sometimes it seems like we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Remembering Columbine

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Apparently they’re considering making a miniseries about Columbine on Lifetime. This has been quite controversial, as many of the survivors of the horrific school shooting that occurred there don’t want the miniseries to be made.

This particular article on the issue seems to point the finger at “the media” for not letting the story die. The Columbine tragedy wasn’t, after all, that unusual–school massacres have happened before, and they will happen again, unfortunately.

This is undoubtedly true. However, Columbine was a bit different than some of the other school shootings. One, the shooters were students. This isn’t always the case. Two, they seemed fairly normal. That’s not always the case either. Three, no one could quite figure out what their motives really were. Even they might not have known.

The death toll at Columbine was 15, if you include the two gunmen who died at their own hands. I wrote about some of my thoughts on the matter earlier here. Others had their own ideas.

Hardly anybody remembers an earlier school tragedy that claimed the lives of 45 people in Michigan. Many of the slain were students, but not all of them. In this particular case, the murderer deliberately drew emergency workers to another location (beating his wife to death and then blowing up his farm) before blowing up the school. Then, after people came to help, he set off another explosion (killing himself in the process).

As it turned out, the perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe, had been buying explosives and putting them in the school for months.

It was May 18, 1927.

Angel of Death: The Demon Core

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Oppenheimer built the bomb
But now he’s dead (dead)
Einstein was very very smart
But not enough not to be dead (dead)

So don’t go into science
You’ll end up dead.

- “Don’t Go Into Politics,” by the Arrogant Worms

People in every field are standing on the shoulders of giants, from music to politics to science, and for the most part, those giants are, in fact, dead.

Many of the scientific giants are also forgotten, and I don’t just mean those who lived hundreds of years ago, but some of those who lived fairly recently. In many cases these dead scientists died naturally. In some cases, however, they became martyrs of a sort, some through inadequate scientific knowledge, some through inadequate safety precautions and some through mistakes.

I’m not exactly sure where Louis Slotin and Henry Daghlian fit on this continuum. Both men were scientists at the Los Alamos in the mid-1940s, and both were killed by the same sphere of plutonium, which afterwards was nicknamed the “demon core.”

Criticality accidents were to blame in both cases. Now I’m not a physicist, but essentially, criticality is what happens when there’s too much of a fissile material (here, plutonium) in one place. When it happens, there’s an increase in the nuclear chain reactions that results in a surge of neutron radiation, which is deadly. (More information here.)

Daghlian died, essentially, because he dropped a brick at the wrong time. Slotin, on the other hand, died because his screwdriver slipped.

In a more meaningful sense, both men died because they were performing scientific experiments with painfully inadequate safety measures. They should have known better, too–Slotin was even warned by Enrico Fermi that he’d be dead in a year if he kept doing the experiments in question.

But their deaths were still tragic.

Slotin did manage to save some of his fellow scientists from a similar fate, and has been hailed as hero for his quick thinking and quick action in the face of his own death. Many people don’t realize that he had spent time in the hospital with Daghlian during the 25 days it took Slotin’s colleague to die of radiation poisoning. Slotin himself died after nine days.

After that, criticality experiments at Los Alamos were done remotely.

The demon core was detonated on July 1, 1946, less than two months after the criticality accident that cost Slotin his life.

The criticality experiments had increased its efficiency, along with killing two scientists and shortening the lifespans of the others who had been in the room.

Don’t forget them.

Amy Winehouse Is Dead (And the 27 Club Nonsense)

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I was grumpy throughout most of yesterday after I heard Amy Winehouse had died.

If there were ever a perfect example of wasted talent it was Amy Winehouse, and yes, sometimes the “wasted” in that sentence had more than one meaning. Of course her death is still under investigation and it is a little premature to put the blame on drugs at this point.

However, there is no denying the woman was a gloriously talented mess.

I have both her albums, Frank, which is pretty much jazz, and Back to Black, which is the soul-jazz-Motown-retro-throwback music Winehouse became famous for. Both albums are excellent, but they feel very different from each other, and I was really hoping she’d manage to claw her way up out of the abyss to produce many more.

Now that won’t happen. She was robbed (or maybe robbed herself?) of her life. And we were robbed of her music. Who knows what could have been?

In a time of auto-tuned, pretty people with vanilla-pretty voices that sound pretty — and pretty much the same — Winehouse sung soul raw, beautiful, with rough edges. (Note: the singing in this video is Winehouse, but the acting is not.)

Winehouse joins the so-called “27 Club,” of influential musicians who died at the age of 27, including Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones, as well as Kurt Cobain.

Infuriating, to see so much wasted talent undone by death.

Strange Places: Lake Nyos, Cameroon

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People have already begun to resettle the area around Lake Nyos, a deep crater lake next to an inactive volcano in the small country of Cameroon, but they may look to the lake with cautious eyes. Overnight, its waters once turned from a brilliant blue to a bloody rust hue, taking more than 1,700 human lives with it — silently.

Around 9:30 p.m. Aug. 21, 1986, the lake "turned over," sending a deadly cloud of poisonous CO2 gas into the air. The gas, being denser than the surrounding air, slunk along the ground, asphyxiating people, wildlife and domestic animals as it moved soundlessly on its way. Many of the victims of the tragedy never even made it out of bed, and literally did not know what had hit them. Others found they inexplicably couldn’t breathe, and collapsed, waking up with strange wounds, if they woke up at all.

Lake Nyos lies on top of a volcanic source, which releases a great deal of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide doesn’t make it to the surface of the lake, but instead is dissolved into the water. When the bottom layer of the lake is disturbed, either by a landslide or by large amounts of rainwater, the carbon dioxide is released. Initially, a volcanic eruption was thought to have been the cause of the disturbance beneath the lake, but later scientists came to believe rapid accumulation of rainwater (denser than the warmer water of the lake) sank to the bottom and caused the overturn.

Either way, it virtually erased all the people in three villages and sent thousands more to the hospital.

Now the lake has been fitted with pipelines meant to release the carbon dioxide in its bottom layers slowly and harmlessly, and people have begun to resettle the areas around the lake.

For more information on Lake Nyos and the disaster, read Time Magazine’s 1986 coverage of the event, the BBC’s take on the dangers of volcanic lake overturn,

You can read about the degassing project here or try the Washington Post’s version.

SDSU has a short article explaining the phenomenon too.

Strange Places: The Zone of Alienation, Ukraine

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The Ferris wheel has remained still for decades, with rust slowly overtaking the brightly painted yellow gondolas meant to entertain children who will likely now never even see them. Nearby, the bumper cars have been entirely overtaken by the wild growth of weeds from between concrete slabs and even trees poking through the wires above. Many of the wooden boards underneath the swing ride have already rotted through.

Time stopped here one April and it has not started again since.

You are in Prypiat, Ukraine, in the heart of the Zone of Alienation, where once upon a time about 50,000 people resided, many of them workers at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

On April 26, 1986, in the process of testing an emergency safety feature, reactor No. 4 at the power plant exploded. In fact, it exploded twice, starting a number of radioactive fires and sending a radioactive cloud into the air.

Prypiat, built to house the power plant’s workers, was evacuated on April 27. Residents were told the evacuation would be temporary, and to take what they needed for three days only.

But the evacuation was permanent, and now, if you are lucky enough to go to Ukraine you can see a Soviet Union city frozen in April 1986, strewn with Soviet iconography and personal possessions. Dolls, a pair of slippers, a playground slide, mail, an old piano, children’s textbooks on the glories of the U.S.S.R., vintage (and radioactive) copies of Pravda, stuffed animals, family photos, gas masks, a toy drum. Everything is still there, if it wasn’t taken by looters, who either weren’t aware of how dangerous the radioactive items were or simply didn’t care.

The Chernobyl power plant continued to operate (minus reactor No. 4, of course) until 2000, and the people who worked there lived in Slavutych, a town constructed outside the Zone after the accident. Tourists are permitted in Prypiat, but people don’t live there.

For photos of Prypiat, Chernobyl and the Zone of Alienation, you can either check here or here. The latter site’s veracity has been questioned (the author claimed to have motorcycled through the Zone, but others allege she merely took a tour; either way, she did take the photographs displayed, and they are worth a look).

For a more scientific explanation of what exactly happened in the reactor, you may either check Wikipedia or this account in Earth Magazine. Here is a German article (in English) from Speigel Online about the disaster, 20 years later, or you can read this little piece from the Guardian about the area in 1993, which refers to a great deal of human activity taking place there. And if you are strong of heart and stomach, here is a Wikipedia page detailing the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.

Bad News… Yay!

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As I have had cause to mention before, people love bad news.

Until, of course, it happens to them, or their families, or someone they know. What’s really necessary to make bad news enjoyable, either through schadenfreude or else simply through thinking "well, my life could be worse, at least <insert bad news here> didn’t happen to me"…. is distance.

Now, you can get some distance away from bad news in several different ways.

As a reporter, having a notebook gives me some distance, because I have to write things down, which can help tamp down empathy (until of course I have to stop writing, which is when I get weepy). Cameras can also provide a convenient separation from the events around you; if you don’t believe this, bring one to a party some time. If you’re tired of being sociable, use the camera as an excuse to leave and just wander around taking pictures.

The best ways to get distance, though, are space and time. It’s a horrible fact of human nature, but the further away something is, the less we care about it. People are more inclined to care about an earthquake in their state than they are about an earthquake on the other side of the planet.

Time is also great for providing emotional distance, and its bad news also offer historical perspective.

So, in the name of historical interest and also, to satisfy people’s desire for bad news, I will share this link with you: The Hope Chest.

It features bad news from the past, generally from about 75-100 years ago, which is enough time for commiseration without too much… miseration.

Evil, Heroism and Survivors: What We Learned from Columbine

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Like the abduction of Jacob Wetterling, the Columbine High School massacre that occurred 10 years ago deeply and profoundly affected kids in my age group.

Though there had been school shootings before that, and there have been many school shootings since, all over the U.S. and in at least a few other countries, Columbine still stands out as a bewildering, horrifying incident that cost 13 people their lives. It also cost parents and even students their peace of mind.

At the time, Columbine meant many things to me. Some of these things were very selfish.

For example, I hated the dominant stream of thought that blamed some or all of the killers’ actions on video games. I play video games. I have never killed anyone. My brother plays video games. He is one of the gentlest, kindest people I know, who always tries to calm me down when I’m upset and tries to help me see the good in other people. He plays video games, and guess what? He’s never killed anyone either.

I found that whole stream of thought to be especially irritating in the months after Columbine, when we were all trying to figure out what happened. Now I think that video games simply gave people something to point to, some reason they could cling to and think: This won’t happen to us.

Another item that became abruptly forbidden was the wearing of trenchcoats of any color, but especially black ones, because the killers were part of the "trenchcoat mafia." I like long coats and always have, but it took a long time for me to decide it was appropriate to wear any kind of trenchcoat. Now it turns out that the killers probably did not even belong to the Trenchcoat Mafia.

Bullying suddenly became a critical issue after Columbine, because the killers were characterized as having been bullied in school.

That made me glad, because I was a victim of relational aggression and girl-bullying as a kid and it was never treated very seriously by anyone except my poor parents–who did their best to help but were basically powerless in the system as it was then. Things are different now, thank goodness.

But it turns out that though the killers may have been bullied, they were bullies in their own right.

And whether you like goths or not, they were not goths. They were not loners, and they were not on antidepressants. They did not like Marilyn Manson.

They were not good kids gone bad.

One was a sociopath, or psychopath, or whatever the current term is for people born without a moral compass. The other was suicidally depressed and paranoid.

And it’s so easy to blame the parents and the families of these killers (who does not want to find a reason, any reason, that it could not happen here), but remember that a sociopath is incapable of feeling guilt and therefore is almost always an amazingly convincing liar. What parent, confronted with a misbehaving child, asks whether the child may be a mass murderer?

Here are the names we remember today.

Rachel Scott
Daniel Rohrbough
Dave Sanders
Kyle Velasquez
Steven Curnow
Cassie Bernall
Isaiah Shoels
Matthew Kechter
Lauren Townsend
John Tomlin
Kelly Fleming
Daniel Mauser
Corey DePooter

We also remember those who were wounded physically and emotionally, including the families of the shooters themselves.

For more information about the tragedy, visit Wikipedia, or read about the myths of the shooting that persist today, or learn about how schools have changed in response to the tragedy, or find out how police have changed their tactics since the massacre.