Tornado Levels Kansas Town

Greensburg, Kansas was totally leveled by a F-5 toranado more than a mile across with winds topping over 200 miles an hour. The pictures are simply amazing. A 20-minute warning allow most of the towns 1260 residents to get into storms cellars and basements. twelve people are confrimed dead, while another 13 are hospitalized.
While some have questioned if the the national guard was lacking the resources to effectively deal with the disaster, the response has been quick and clean.

Links
Satelite Images
Pictures from the air
Pictures from the ground
Story on Bush's visit
Story on National Guard ResponseFrom the New York Times
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Story on the death toll

Tanker, Tanker, Burning Bright...

I'm sure most of you have heard about the tanker fire in the bay area which took down part of the MacArthur Maze, one of the busiest freeway interchanges in the United States. While the destruction was caused by a truck, a lot of the news coverage has compared the damage to that occured in the 1989 Loma Preita quake. The collaspe of the nearbyCypress Street Viaduct in the 1989 quake killed 42 people and disrupted traffic for nearly a decade. The recent accident really points out the vunerability our trasportation infastructure, both the natural disasters but also man made ones.

Steven Pyne's point on the impotance of fire to human culture is also illustrated. The steel for the interchange was forged in fire, and fire brought it down. The fire was caused by fuel, meant to burn iside our engines.

The images of the scene are quite intriguing, and the accident has attracted a large amount of media coverage. [more pictures]

"Not that I enjoy destruction, or the misery of commuters, but these photos are really beautiful. The sight of an instantly recognizable, man-made artifice sort of dissolving back into a vague, earthy blob is very fascinating." (via metafilter)