Four years ago on this day, I witnessed the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant cooling tower implosion. Explosives tore through the support columns, toppling the 499-foot concrete hourglass-shaped behemoth and slamming into the ground. The whole event, from detonation to crash, took about ten seconds.

That wasn’t the only story I went home with. Two minutes before the detonation, my Nikon D70 digital single lens reflex (dSLR) behaved very odd. At 6:58 a.m. a test shot was taken, but the result on the playback screen was a severely underexposed image.

“This can’t be good,” I thought. Then the camera’s shutter button would not release. A little green light began to flash and the LCD display at the top indicated a severe malfunction.

It’s 5:59 a.m., one minute before detonation. There is no back up camera body on hand, except for my Hi-8 analog video camera that was rolling, capturing my gripes about the camera. I scramble to change out batteries, lenses, and memory cards, but no luck.

“Everything was working fine,” I tell my friend, who is also a professional photographer.

“There it goes!” One spectator shouts as I’m setting the lens into the camera bag.

I jumped up, bumping the camcorder tripod in the process. All I could do is stand there, shake my head and watch the tower plummet to the ground before disappearing into a dust cloud. This camera’s problem prevented me to snap one image of what I considered a once-in-a-lifetime moment.

Later that morning, I returned home and played back the video. On the following day, I boxed up the camera and shipped it for repairs. If there is one thing I learned out of this ordeal, that is to always have a backup camera.

View Larger Image

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.