Word: damming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Berserk Feather. Near the headwaters of California's two most important river systems, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, great dams such as Shasta, Folsom, Friant and Pine Flat curbed angry water that might have caused infinitely more damage and death. At flood's height, more than 200,000 cubic feet of water a second poured into the reservoir back of the Sacramento's Shasta Dam, which shrank the downstream rush to only 16,000 cubic feet a second, saving the rich Sacramento Valley...
There was no such barrier on the Feather River, where the proposed $400 million concrete Oroville Dam, planned as the world's largest, is still a paper dream tabled by legislative inertia. The Feather went berserk. It swept madly to its confluence with the Yuba River in the peach country just southwest of Marysville (pop. 12,500) and Yuba City (pop. 8,000). Advised to flee across the river to their sister town, the people of Marysville quickly found themselves scrambling for their lives in Yuba City, where the flood demolished levees while dikes held fast in Marysville...
...Rivers of Babylon. The development board has already built irrigation dams across the Tigris and Euphrates north of Baghdad, while dams, channels and dikes gouged by German, French, British and American contractors will catch next spring's floodwaters for the first time and lead them into new $30 million lakes at Wadi Tharthar and Habbaniya. Downstream, other contractors are digging drainage ditches and scooping silt from the ancient Babylonian water-distribution canals, now scheduled to be used again as in Hammurabi's time. In upper Iraq, a French firm is building a $28 million concrete dam at Dokan...
Clap goes the thunder, zing says the lightning, down come the rains, out goes the dam, wham goes an earthquake. Temples crash. A wall of water whirls the hero away. Fissures swallow tons of peasants, and the earth munches on them the way a cow chews oats. Lana, meanwhile, is hammering picturesquely on death's door as she battles a tropical fever, and as soon as she can walk she staggers, understandably enough, toward the nearest exit. She is apt to find it crowded...
...does. "Goa?" he said. "That's a Portuguese province." And, of course that made things just hunky-dory with you because you could say some nice things about Kashmir and come off top dog after all. pinch and you got a nice fat contract to build those Burmese a dam. That was a fine present, wasn...