This is fine. Everything’s fine.

Among increasing occurrences of extreme weather around the world, residents of Saitama Prefecture were handed an especially disturbing phenomenon on 2 March when a black tinged rain was found in various places. Many took to Twitter and posted images of it using the hashtag “black rain” (#黒い雨).

▼ Black rain fell over Saitama…

▼ Some kind of black rain is falling?

▼ Black rain came down today over a wide area including Ageo, Iwatsuki, Kuki, and Hasuda… It looks like oil and is under investigation… They said they checked radiation levels and nothing unusual was found… Black rain is disturbing…

One of the cities affected, Hasuda, issued a statement on their official website that same day, claiming that after receiving complaints of black puddles in roads and on cars, they had measured radiation levels and found nothing out of the ordinary. However, they added that the cause of this dark rain is unclear and currently being investigated.

Black rain is an especially dark omen in Japan, where it was often seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb attacks. Back then, it was caused by radioactive material sent into the upper atmosphere from the blasts known as fallout, which mixed in with natural rain and blackened it.

However, no nuclear incidents were reported recently, and a more likely cause would be some kind of pollutant or mineral particles mixed into the rainwater. This would make it similar to the cases of “blood rain” that fell in India a few years ago.

Still, it’s undeniably unsettling, and readers of the news gathered online to express their concern and share possibilities as to what happened.

“That’s a little too scary.”
“That’s about as bad an omen as you can get these days.”
“Black rain… This year is full of surprises.”
“I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but there was a fire in the area that same day.”
“Maybe it’s oil from an airplane passing overhead.”
“Are they secretly burning the bodies of coronavirus victims?”
“It might not be fallout, but it’s probably hazardous, so be careful out there.”
“I think it was caused by a fire in the area.”
“It’s the coronavirus! It’s falling from the sky now!”
“Didn’t North Korea fire missiles on that day?”
“It was a fire at a plastic factory. There you go.”

Luckily, thanks to everyone having a camera at the ready, it was all too easy to jump on YouTube and confirm that indeed a huge fire broke out near Hasuda during that same rainfall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyCE0x8aKIY

With the video evidence, it’s pretty easy to see how that much smoke could mix in with and dye much of the downwind precipitation black.

Luckily, this all turned out to be an open-and-shut mystery, but it doesn’t explain why Hasuda City never acknowledged this on their website (as of this writing, two days later on 4 March).

At a time when the dispersion of information is more important than ever, it’s very unsettling that they were either unaware of the gigantic fire in their own city, or didn’t feel it was necessary to mention while people online were speculating about mass-cremations and North Korean missiles.

Source: Hasuda City, YouTube/Entertainment Video Channel!, My Game News Flash
Featured image: Twitter/@3Miyabi1
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