Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, he is now a post-doc at the University of Johannesburg. 
I walked into work today under a beautiful, cloudless, sky - until I looked in the direction of the UJ campus, where an ugly black cloud was accumulating in the direction of the building that houses the Geology department. It was only when I got much closer that it became clear (to my relief) that the fire was some way beyond the campus grounds, and it wasn't the result of an overheating mass spectrometer or something. Here's a picture from the roof of our building:
The fire seemed to have died down a bit by the time I took this photo, because the thickest cloud had already drifted over us in the direction of the city centre.
There's nothing on the news about this yet, but one of my colleagues reckons that it might be a substation that has caught fire before (apparently Eskom's maintentance philosophy is something along the lines of 'leave it until something explodes'). Hopefully, no-one has been hurt.
For some reason, I'm thinking that today is a good day to back up my data.
Comments
Sorry to ruin your (well founded) cynicism in Eskom, but a mattress factory in Industria had a major fire this morning.
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2345920,00.html
Judging from the report it's a good chance that this is what you saw.
Posted by: Fritha | June 24, 2008 5:19 AM
Nice pics of the fire - smoke, anyway. It sounds like no one was hurt, and that's a good thing.
Posted by: Silver Fox | June 24, 2008 9:00 AM
well, you inspired me to back up my data too.
Posted by: ScienceWoman | June 24, 2008 3:59 PM
Looks like a typical morning in Naples, Italy to me. What with all the trash burning you see here.
Posted by: Katrina | June 26, 2008 4:23 PM