Pac Web - North Edition
Surfing Bikini Web Site Wonders
Whether You're Into Scuba Diving Or Nuclear Tests, It's All There
How valuable is Internet promotion for scuba diving at the former nuclear test site of Bikini Atoll? "Our Web site is the most important way of advertising our dive operation," said Bikini trust liaison Jack Niedenthal, who created the www.bikiniatoll.com Web site three years ago. Since Bikini opened to scuba divers in 1996, it has gone from just a handful to about 150 last year. It’s a high-end dive program, so though the numbers are relatively small, people pay a premium to dive on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, the Japanese flagship Nagato and others sunk in 170 feet of water by an early nuclear test at Bikini.
"It’s astounding what it’s done for the dive operation," said Niedenthal, who supervises use of the Bikinians’ $200 million resettlement trust funds when he’s not promoting diving. "But it’s also great promotion for the Bikinians. There are numerous interviews with elder Bikinians. A lot of the older men have died, but you can still read their stories on the website."
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Part of Niedenthal’s agenda in creating the website was to answer the dozens of questions about Bikini he receives each week from journalists, student researchers and anti-nuclear activists — most of which are pretty routine: how many nuclear tests at Bikini? Is it safe to live there?
"It’s like having a running conversation with the world," said Niedenthal, a former Peace Corps Volunteer who’s worked for the Bikinians since the mid-1980s. "If someone emails me a question about Bikini and the answer isn’t there, by the next day I’ll add the information to the website. It’s so big now, it can take several days to read it."
From its first days on the Web, the Bikini homepage has attracted interest. The second day it was posted to the web, 475 "hits" were recorded after the search engine Yahoo! listed it as its "site of the day." When Netscape featured it as its "site of the week" a few days later, 5,700 people visited it in one day. The peak was during the build up to the Discovery Channel’s live broadcast from Bikini in late 1999 when the Web site address was put on national TV in America. "We received 60,000 hits that day," he said.
What do all of these hits mean for the dive operation? Niedenthal said that virtually every diver who comes to Bikini has thoroughly researched Bikini through the website before coming. The divers know what they’re going to get at Bikini from the Web site, he said. The number that traveled to Bikini in 2000 was a 20 percent increase over the previous year.
On the dive side, Niedenthal has included a massive amount of information, illustrations and photos on all of the World War II ships sunk in Bikini’s lagoon. He’s included short film clips showing what it looks like to dive inside several of the underwater vessels, and being face to face with a school of hungry sharks in Bikini’s famed "Shark Pass".
The Web site is also a gold mine of information on the Bikinians’ experience with the nuclear age, from photographs and narrative of the their resettlement in 1946 to recent-day returns to Bikini and interviews with island elders. Niedenthal has also included information on all of the Bikinians’ multi-million dollar trust funds, the number, yield and location of all 67 U.S. tests in the Marshalls, and many maps.
What’s the most frequently asked question he gets? "That’s easy," he said. "It’s ‘did Bikini take its name from the bathing suit?’ No, it didn’t. It’s the other way around."
Among trivia on the website is a history of the bikini bathing suit and a list of the many different movies with the word "bikini" in them. "We’ve got trivia out the wazoo," he said.
