The Gad About Town

Reactor number four exploded at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (at the time a part of the USSR) on this date 30 years ago.

Officially, 41 deaths are attributed to the explosion and its immediate effects, most of them reactor employees who were not firefighters, some of whom knowingly sacrificed their own lives and health as they attempted to manage the radioactive fire in and near the reactor, or direct water towards it. Many local firefighters also died of acute radiation poisoning within days or weeks, as they may not have known or were not told about the unique hazards at a radioactive accident.

It remains the worst nuclear accident on the planet and the first to reach a Level 7 Event classification (Fukushima was the second accident to acquire that distinction). Almost a half-million people were displaced from the region over the next 15 years. Much of the eastern portion of Western Europe received some contamination from the disaster.
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Martin Waldseemüller, a German mapmaker, published a map of the world based on the journeys of Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus on this date in 1507. The map assigned part of the globe the name, “America,” and it is the first appearance of that term.

The title remained even though Waldseemüller himself later came to regret this salute to Vespucci, and in later maps he labeled this part of the world “Terra Incognita.” But too many copies of the earlier map with “America” as a label had been distributed, and the name had already permeated European (and later, American) consciousness. “Incognita Land” simply would not have worked as a name for a ’70s soft rock band.

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Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday rescued a U.S. flag from two people who had jumped from the stands at Dodger Stadium to publicly set fire to it 40 years ago today. (Photo at top.)
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