Word: planted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Danger is a constant companion of workers in the petrochemical industry. But no one could be prepared for the explosions and the fireball that last week reduced a Phillips Petroleum Co. plastics plant near Houston to a blackened maze. "It was like being inside a bomb," said purchasing agent Clay Howell, who was knocked out of his chair 350 yds. from the blasts. Trying to stop the inferno was "like spitting in the ocean," said Houston fireman Joseph Phillips. Twenty-two employees were either killed or presumed dead...
...company suggested that a seal on one of the plant's eleven-story-high reactors may have developed a leak, leading to the ignition of a stream of gas. But workers contended that the cloud was so dense that a valve must have been left open. In any case, the disaster dramatized the need for greater concern for safety by the chemical industry. Its lobbyists had persuaded the Bush Administration to remove tougher safety restrictions on such facilities from proposed legislation for renewing the Clean...
Patrick Wallace, a worker in a local paper plant, shinnied up a tree to reach the fallen highway. He saw two women dead in a flattened auto. Then he heard "one little whimper" from the backseat. Pinned beneath a slab of concrete and the body of his mother was Julio Berumen, 6. His less seriously injured sister, Cathy, 8, also lay there. For nearly an hour, Wallace struggled to free the boy. Once he felt movement. "But it turned out it was just the clothing sliding from his body...
...furniture, toppling walls and collapsing roofs. Waterfront houses lurched and fell apart, hotels hopped off their foundations. In the working-class district south of Market Street, tenements turned into tangled splinters, and four hotels capsized and collapsed, trapping scores. An added blast rattled the area, as the city gas plant blew up. Thousands of chimneys plunged through roofs. Many residents drowned, trapped, in deluges from ruptured water mains. An elaborate new city hall disintegrated. When the Richter scale was devised later, experts rated the quake at a tremendously potent...
Wilkes cited a study by the National Academy of Sciences that found that at least 50 million acres of rainforest a year are lost--an area the size of England, Wales and Scotland combined. These areas are home to about half the five to 10 million plant and animal species on the globe. Unless action is taken, the report says, by the year 2000 one-fifth of the remaining rainforest will disappear, destroying about half-a-million species...