Word: slag
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Slums and slag heaps, Freudian phrases and Marxian metaphors, the fall of prices and the Fall of Man-all found a place in Wystan Auden's writing. No poet more constantly and conscientiously tried to extend the domain of things poetical...
...steep Blue Mountains of the Great Dividing Range it speeds toward the stark-naked Nullarbor Plain. It flashes by farms with earth so red that the livestock watering holes seem to be filled with blood. It races past nickel, lead and gold mines, flocks of fleecy merinos, smelters, slag heaps, ports and forests. It passes signs exhorting WELFARE NOT WARFARE and OUR HOSPITAL NEEDS YOUR HELP: PLEASE GET SICK. A big painted rock aimed at shooing away pilots seeking to land says PISS OFF. To the north, lights from the Woomera range and tracking station, used for guiding American astronauts...
...when the mills fire up and the whole South-East side of Chicago glows red for a few minutes. If the atomic Armageddon ever comes, South-East siders will think that it is just another big fire-up. The yellow street sign dimly reads 100th street through the caked slag dust pollution and snow falls gently tinged with red from the mills. It is winter vacation, and I am going to see an old friend...
Chris and his mother barely escaped with their lives last February when a badly constructed coal-slag dam gave way and unleashed 130 million gallons of seething water on the mining communities of Buffalo Creek, W. Va., killing 125 and leaving 4,000 homeless (TIME, March 13). Chris was carried to high ground by his father, but his two sisters were swept from their mother's arms and drowned. Last week, seven months after the disaster, much of the physical havoc caused by the flood had been repaired, but the psychological damage to hundreds of families like the Hopsons...
...which matters little to the grieving and homeless miners of Buffalo Creek Hollow, many of whose kin and neighbors now lie beneath the markers that dot the rolling hills of West Virginia. The people of Buffalo Creek say that they have known for years that the slag pile was dangerous. And yet, in the face of a peril so imminent, they continued to live in the threatened valley because it was the only life they knew...