Burned during the night

Abandoned, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Vantaankoski rapids, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

While reading the local news today, I noticed that an old abandoned mill had burned during the night (news item in Finnish), due to arson. Fortunatelly nobody was hurt.

When fetching my car from service on Monday, I happened to take a photo of this particular mill, which is situated by the Vantaankoski rapids. I didn't realize it was a mill, though. In retrospect this is of course obvious from the placement of the buildings beside the rapids.

I was originally planning to see whether there would be nice ice formations to photograph, but no such luck. Then I noticed these buildings and took a few photos of them, although it was quite a gray day. There were other buildings in the area as well, and one of them had long curved icicles hanging from the eaves.

I had plans to visit this place in spring, thinking that there would be much to explore in better light than we have now in the middle of winter. It is sad to see such attitude towards old buildings as demonstrated by this arsony.

Update: While ironing my shirts, I thought further on this. In a way this is the other side of Medusa's head - photography freezes time, and you can't return to take photographs you did not take earlier. Each moment in time and place is unique. The burned mill is a demonstration of this. Perhaps I could have taken better photographs of the mill, today it is too late. Now there is the burned mill to take photographs of - and what comes after that?

Update 2: For a moment, when reading the news this morning, I even had a thought that perhaps someone saw my photograph of the mill and thought that it was a perfect place for arsony. But no, that is not feasible, especially as I didn't provide any instructions on where to find it. On the other hand, when location-based photo tagging becomes commonplace, there might be something to this. Take a photo, put it on the net, and the viewers can find the place on a map. But I think this could be more of a good than bad thing, for example when traveling to a strange city and wanting to know how it looks there. Although there are some implications for misuse of the data as well.