A $20 fire extinguished in a hallway closet would have prevented all of the suffering, injuries, and property damage. Was this guy some kind of smoking enthusiast or a collector of cigarette lighters? And what is the child's voice I hear in the background saying? Is that some part of the video chat software?

Text to speech telling him.

Look behind you, smother it with the futon don't fan it....etc.

It was painful.

That definitely makes it worse. Sounds like they were saying what I was thinking. It was maddening to watch him mishandle the opportunity he had to smother the fire with the futon.

... and it was really good. It made me a lot more sympathetic to the situation the plant operators faced. It was a nightmare scenario: they lost electric power even to the instrumentation in the control rooms. As a result, every meter and gauge was useless and they had no idea what the conditions were in the reactor.

Certainly, it was stunningly irresponsible not to have a battery backup system for the reactor pumps and control room located on high ground. I hope the nuclear plants that are being brought back on line have had batteries added if they didn't have them already. If I remember correctly, TEPCO also did a terrible job in assessing the risk and communicating what was going on.

I don't know a lot about the situation, and it looks like you were there, so I'd be grateful for any insights you might want to provide.

Also, I'll find the video I saw and post it in the group for anyone who's interested.

Thanks!

Hard to say what really happened there, the government and the PRIVATE corporation that caused the disaster are not sharing much.

... describes the problems with the swamped generators. What really amazed me was that the staff, at one point, went out into the parking lot and pulled the batteries out of all the cars that had been destroyed by the tsunami, wired them up in series and parallel, and used them to turn on the DC-powered instrumentation in the reactor control room.

Unbelievable. A backup for the backup diesel generators, in the form of a large battery bank, was desperately needed. Had Daicihi had batteries sufficient to power the control room instruments and the cooling pumps for 48 hours, the entire catastrophe could have been averted. Of course, that battery bank would have had to have been located fifty feet above the ground or it would have succumbed to the same salt water that took the diesel generators out.

Thanks again for posting it.

Coming from someone living in Japan, that means a lot.