On the spot, I decided to put my journalistic chops to work and start talking to real people working in the real world rather than letting my brain continue to spin in the cyber cycle. Saying this out loud sparked something with my internal bullshit meter, and I realized how truly uninformed I was. Inundated and eventually swept up in the emotion of it all, I found myself asking my wife in all seriousness if we should consider selling our home before the Fukushima fallout caused the coastal real estate market to crash.

The mainstream media largely ignored these reports of deadly oceans and nuclear fish, so into this information vacuum rushed even more doomsday stories. With nuclear events historically shrouded in misinformation and bureaucratic double-speak, it was anything but surprising that the drumbeat of terror grew. After all, fear, truly visceral fear, the kind nuclear fallout ignites, has always tended to spread like wildfire - even before we had social media to fan the flames. Beautifully illustrated with maps showing wide-ranging radioactive fallout, these stories were being read, believed, and then shared by intelligent folk around the globe. I read reports titled “Holy Fukushima - Radiation Already Killing North Americans” and “28 Signs That the West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried with Nuclear Radiation from Fukushima” and “The Worldwide Nuclear Crisis That No One Is Talking About.” These were no-holds-barred declarations that Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster was now a threat to life as we know it here on the West Coast. It found its way to my inbox and my Twitter feed, took up residence on my Facebook wall, and dominated conversations with friends and colleagues. The panic started sometime after the New Year. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window).

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Fallout west coast map