Word: delta
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Almost overnight, the symbol was everywhere to be seen. On the doors and porch posts of houses, huts and hovels from the Delta to the highlands, millions of neatly painted South Vietnamese flags suddenly appeared, in gorgeous hues of canary yellow and crimson...
...Danger. Why had the delta's 3,000,000 Bengalis been so unprepared? A U.S. weather satellite's photo of severe weather in the Bay of Bengal had been received in the East Pakistani capital of Dacca more than ten hours before the cyclone struck. A warning -moha bipod shonket (big danger coming)-was broadcast, but someone forgot to include a code number indicating the force of the expected storm...
...worldwide response to the catastrophe was unprecedentedly swift and generous. Less than four days after the cyclone struck, Red Cross supplies were arriving at Dacca airport. Soon the delta skies began to fill with an international fleet of 29 choppers (U.S., British, French, West German and Saudi Arabian), which are the only means of moving supplies rapidly in an area with many canals, few roads and hardly any airstrips. A four-ship British task force anchored in the bay and began choppering food, clothing, medicine and water purification pills to the remote coastal areas. Pledges of aid from 40 countries...
...Though people were still reported floating alive offshore three days after the cyclone, the Pakistani navy was never ordered to search for survivors. Some 500,000 tons of grain were stockpiled in East Pakistan warehouses, but the 40-odd Pakistani army helicopters that could have airlifted them to the delta sat on their pads in West Pakistan. India, the government explained-falsely-would not allow the craft to be ferried over 1,000 miles of its territory. President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan waited a total of 13 days before making a formal visit to the Ganges area...
...cholera that killed 50,000. So far, miraculously, East Pakistan's water supplies seem remarkably free of contamination, and there has been no sign of the feared flare-up of cholera, which is endemic in the area. Health officials speculated that, after decades of living in the Ganges Delta, the Bengalis must be pretty much inured to any calamity-bacteriological, meteorological, or political...