MONK PRAYS: A Buddhist monk offered a prayer in front of debris in Otsuchi, Japan, Tuesday. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

Photo overlays of Japan from the New York Times

They’ve just released a new map, and I think it’s even more impressive! They’re calling it the Photo-Overlays of “The Aftermath in Japan” from New York Times, which places 30 different images from the New York Times as photo overlays in Google Earth. The photos were selected from this feature on the NYT, “The Big Picture” at Boston.com, Oregon Live, and more are being added all the time. However, as you can see in the image below, they’ve taken their time to line up the photos very carefully and the result is quite immersive.

via sunfoundation

Above, workers in the control room of Reactor No. 2 at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan; the lighting panels above them had been shaken loose by the earthquake. Photo: Kyodo News /Times via inothernews

With the power out, trucks were parked in a circle with their lights on, creating a shadowy stage. A manager from the Tokyo Electric Power Company explained how the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been slammed by a mammoth tsunami and rocked by hydrogen explosions and had become highly radioactive. Some workers wept.

That was the scene at J-Village, 12 miles south of the plant, on the night of March 15. Hundreds of firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and workers from Tokyo Electric Power convened at the sports training center, arguing long and loudly about how best to restore cooling systems and prevent nuclear fuel from overheating. Complicating matters, a lack of phone service meant that they had little input from upper management.

“There were so many ideas, the meeting turned into a panic,” said one longtime Tokyo Electric veteran present that day. He made the comments in an interview with The New York Times, one of several interviews that provided a rare glimpse of the crisis as the company’s workers experienced it. “There were serious arguments between the various sections about whether to go, how to use electrical lines, which facilities to use and so on.”

The quarreling echoed the alarm bells ringing throughout Tokyo Electric, which has been grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges since March 11, when the severe earthquake and massive tsunami upended northeastern Japan. It is also an insight, through interviews, e-mails and blog posts, into the problems faced by the thousands of often anxious but eager Tokyo Electric Power employees working to re-establish order.

Many of them — especially the small number charged with approaching damaged reactors and exposing themselves to unusually high doses of radiation — are viewed as heroes, preventing the world’s second-worst nuclear calamity from becoming even more dire.

But unlike their bosses, who appear daily in blue work coats to apologize to the public and explain why the company has not yet succeeded in taming the reactors, the front-line workers have remained almost entirely anonymous.

in he New York Times

THE SEARCH   Hiro Ono, 70, collected salvagable items in the tsunami-devastated village of Noda, Iwate Prefecture. Winter weather continued to hamper recovery efforts in the north of Japan.  (Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP-Getty via the New York Times)

via inothernews