Monday, April 04, 2011
There are no Red Adairs in Japan
I'm always a little suspicious of sentences that begin with 'there are no'.
New Yorkers have a tendency to say ignorant things like "There are no pianos in Japan", or "There are no basements in Oklahoma", or "There are no second acts in America." They only make themselves look foolish to Americans when they say such things.
In this case, though, I'm going to make such a statement, and I'm (uncharacteristically!) convinced that America has a superior talent in this one area.
Japan seems to have been completely unready for the Fukushima disaster, only reaching a real emergency level of improvisation when it may be too late.
When something goes seriously wrong in America we have a number of specialist firms, pretty nearly mercenaries, ready to take on the job with instant ingenuity for big money. Red Adair of the oilfields is most famous, but there was a less-known nuclear effort when Three Mile Island went wrong. They found a company that supplied Jumpers, who Jumped into the containment building for very short periods with proper tools and protection to clean things up.
I knew one of those Jumpers... she was a natural adventurer who had been an Army nurse in Vietnam and went on to spy for the "State Department" (i.e. some agency without a name). She survived TMI just fine and made plenty of money in the process. Classic soldier-of-fortune type, female subspecies. ¶ 10:45 AM
New Yorkers have a tendency to say ignorant things like "There are no pianos in Japan", or "There are no basements in Oklahoma", or "There are no second acts in America." They only make themselves look foolish to Americans when they say such things.
In this case, though, I'm going to make such a statement, and I'm (uncharacteristically!) convinced that America has a superior talent in this one area.
Japan seems to have been completely unready for the Fukushima disaster, only reaching a real emergency level of improvisation when it may be too late.
When something goes seriously wrong in America we have a number of specialist firms, pretty nearly mercenaries, ready to take on the job with instant ingenuity for big money. Red Adair of the oilfields is most famous, but there was a less-known nuclear effort when Three Mile Island went wrong. They found a company that supplied Jumpers, who Jumped into the containment building for very short periods with proper tools and protection to clean things up.
I knew one of those Jumpers... she was a natural adventurer who had been an Army nurse in Vietnam and went on to spy for the "State Department" (i.e. some agency without a name). She survived TMI just fine and made plenty of money in the process. Classic soldier-of-fortune type, female subspecies. ¶ 10:45 AM
