In a previous post, Nuke Wars and Nuns, I mentioned a YouTube user called BeautifulGirlByDana, real name Dana Durnford. Dana has been on YouTube for years and uses his channel to promote indie music artists (here). He also posts his own rants about current affairs, including a couple of pieces about Fukushima when it kicked off in 2011. Since then, Dana was largely silent about Fukushima; that is, until 9 months ago, when he started doing 1 hour YouTube live streams about all things nuclear, and he’s been doing a live stream almost every day since then. To give you a flavour of Dana, here’s an excerpt from one of the pieces he put out this week (warning: contains bad language)…
Dana’s rants about Fukushima, et al, has caught people’s attention and his YouTube channel now has thousands of subscribers. He recently put up a web site called The Nuclear Proctologist which has got a ‘donate’ button, which pulled in 600 bucks. Dana lives on the Sunshine Coast, the mainland and chain of islands that stretches for a hundred miles or so north of Vancouver, in western Canada. Using the 600 bucks, Dana and his friend Terry spent 9 days visiting 16 beaches from one end of the Sunshine Coast to the other. They took loads of photographs of the foreshore on these beaches, and, despite the fact that many of the photos are of poor quality, they do appear to show that much of the wildlife has disapeared. On Sunday, Dana did a live stream presentation of it all called HORROR ” Pacific Ocean Now Dead From Fukushima Radiation “ (it follows at the end of this post). The day before, Dana posted a trailer. He ended the trailer with this…
The full length trailer can be found here.
The presentation on Sunday has attracted so much attention that this week thousands of dollars have been donated. Dana is going to use this money to mount an ‘Expedition for Life’, in which he and his friends are going to explore the coast further, this time taking better quality photos, and also samples and geiger counter readings (the west coast of North America is directly downstream and downwind of Japan). Dana will be streaming it all on YouTube.
If this all sounds a bit like you-couldn’t-make-it-up stuff, I should perhaps also mention that Dana often describes himself as ‘an elderly cripple’. He used to be a commercial diver and ran big operations on both the east and west coasts of Canada. 15 years ago he had a serious accident while diving by the northern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia. The accident left him crippled, and he spent ten years in a hospital bed (the username ‘BeautifulGirlByDana’ comes from the nurses who looked after him). Here’s Dana talking this week about his infirmity (and note the foreshore photo in this clip, and how devoid of life it is)…
There’s many ironies when it comes to Fukushima, and one of them is that Dana is trying to get the funds to return to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where he had his diving accident 15 years ago, and a place that he thought he’d never return to. He’s going back to see how much damage Fukushima radiation has done to the sea life; a situation that he could never have imagined.
The news media have been reporting the die-offs around the Pacific. They could hardly not report it, considering that multi-million dollar fishing industries are being decimated, but of course no mention of the ‘F’ word in any of these reports. It’s always a ‘mysterious disease’ (you can find my post about it here, in which I go into detail about the radiation side of things). If Dana & Co can prove that just about all life has been wiped out in Canadian coastal waters, that will be a real game changer. Dana’s presentation is more than an hour long, and he rambles on a bit in places, but it’s well worth watching…
For a further update on Dana’s ‘Expedition for Life’ see Intrepid II Goes Forth.
Hey, I live on the sunshine coast. Dana is not local nor does he live here, and his account of our shoreline is very farfetched. He has deleted all comments on his YouTube video from locals stating that this is not a dead zone by any mean.
r is a link to a video of my walk at one of the beaches he visited and claimed was devoid of any forms of life. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tCt2E7z7v8Y
Hi Claire. Thanks for the link. Good to see that life is still thriving in places. Here’s another YouTube vid that you’re probably aware of. It’s from a guy who lives in Tofino, on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20HYCDKKKmg
As I said in my blog post above, the massive marine die-offs in the Pacific Ocean have been well documented by the mainstream media. The contention comes because these reports never mention the three reactors that are in complete, ongoing meltdown at Fukushima. In the MSM the Pacific die-offs are always attributed to a ‘mysterious disease’.
Dana lives in Powell River, on the Sunshine Coast. See this short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XioLilyRPMY
My problem with Dana is I do not see transparency in his fund collections , I have seen also other videos in the same areas seemingly teaming with life .
He deletes anyone who disagrees or threatens them .
I hope his heart is in the right place because he could do damage to the anti nuclear community if he is not on the up and up
It also seems like he has a cultish following .
No doubt he has been a service to the community but he needs to account for this money in public .
I have heard that he has been reported to the authorities as well .
I want to add I also have been following every video he does and had faith in him but I’m on the fence with this one .
Hi Be.
Although I’m strongly anti-nuke, and don’t try to disguise the fact, the main reason I made this blog post about Dana was because of the human interest angle: an ‘elderly cripple’, who’s not that well off, puffing on ciggies and cusing and cursing, taking on the might of big corporations. Whatever you feel about Dana, few would dispute that he’s a bit of a character, as I’ve tried to show in this blog post, and I hope that even someone who’s pro-nuke would find it interesting.
Perhaps I should add that I used to live on Vancouver Island, and have travelled extensively in the Pacific northwest, so I also come at it from that angle.
I understand your reservations about Dana, and we will have to see how his ‘Expedition for Life’ pans out. Since making this blog post there’s been lots of further developments, which will go into my next post about Dana.
As I say above, it’s all you-couldn’t-make-it-up stuff!
Rob thank you
This bears watching , I have been an activist for over 35 years and I am very protective of our community perhaps with a cynicism ..
I am looking forward to your next installment .
Great blog thanks
I always find more truth in abandoning the ineffectual orthodoxies in favor of getting to know the real human beings who are genuinely concerned about everyone’s predicament. Durnford gets chump change and does a lot (for a crippled guy) in return. He provides probably a little too much detail over where each donated dollar is spent unless you would like to learn about boats, motors, batteries, etc.
By the way, I’d like to say thanks to Rob Godfrey for well written, unbiased coverage of Dana. It’s thoughtful and considerate.
Dana what is this I hear that NASA is now saying that we are going through Global Cooling? I seriously doubt that the warming oceans can cool in my lifetime or our grandchildren children’s lifetime you get the picture. More misinformation being spread what does Jim Hansen have to say about this. All this radiation in the water will not cool the oceans anytime soon. I love the way our govt spreads propaganda.