My hope and my intention was that people would experience the tragedy of what Chernobyl was in every regard: a scientific tragedy, a political tragedy, an emotional and personal tragedy, all of that.
Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, in the summer of 1991, the last summer the Soviet Union was still in existence, I visited Ukraine. I trekked out to the 20-mile exclusion zone - it had been cleared of all people after the accident - together with some local environmental activists.
After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.
I'll never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.
Thousands of people may have been killed by hurricane Katrina and many more could die in its aftermath because of the President's refusal to heed the calls of governors for help in repairing the infrastructure in their states.
The only thing scarier than Godzilla is Godzilla's lawyers.
Armageddon was yesterday, today we have a serious problem.
I don’t think that there is ever a Mission Accomplished with an oil spill…the consequences go on for years.
The plague swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. The entire world changed.
Abd al-Rahman Ibn Mohammad
Scientists say an 8.9 earthquake here could knock down buildings, flood coastal areas... and improve the roads.
In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no phones, no computers, no light, no power. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights coming out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.
I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.
As I was writing 'The Shock Doctrine', I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?
Many feel that sitting at a screen sweating over the design of handrail details for the next cute downtown boutique hotel just doesn't make sense when more than 150,000 people have lost their lives, more than five million people have been made homeless and whole towns have been swept away.
If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they-and we all-can be 'liberated.' The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions-the vision-which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback.
I still have dreams about Hillsborough. Well, nightmares, anyway.
The reality is this city will not be the same for a while, ... We're not saying bring New Orleans back today.
I haven't actually spoken to my parents since the hurricane.
There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice.
When your whole system, your whole civilized system goes down, this is pretty much what you get left with. We have no communications, no running water, no electricity, no real help.
I don't know what it is about these post-apocalyptic movies where it's like... people really want to see what happens and know what goes on in people's minds when they lose everything. With nothing left of what we had, do people revert back to animals or stay civilized?
In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan - because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks.
