Word: truck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fire engines had been headed for a minor flare-up in some trash barrels a few feet from where Rutherford "had parked his death-laden truck. Assistant Fire Chief Roy McFarlane thought he had things under control, sent one fireman to the hospital with burned hands. City Patrolman Don DeSues, 32, took over traffic direction at the nearest corner. Suddenly, George Rutherford's truck went off with a blast bigger than a World War II blockbuster, dug a 50-ft.-wide crater 20 ft. deep, pulverized six blocks of business buildings, transients' apartments and homes, smashed the windows...
...looked up to see the mushroom cloud," said Hotelman Paul Ryan. Instead he saw a 300-ft. pillar of flame. One squad car flew 100 ft., its dome light and driver cop left largely undamaged. Across the street from the truck, the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. fell into a level pile of rubble. The Gerretsen store's stock of bolts and nuts sprayed like fragmentation shards. One eight-year-old boy was carried to the hospital with a finger-sized piece of steel driven into his brain. The only traces to be found of Traffic Policeman DeSues were...
...harder to come by. The coroner's deputies accounted for twelve bodies, then sent off for lab tests samples of lighter ashes that might be eight or more transients in transient apartments. Five blocks from the crater lay a bent axle, the biggest piece left of the truck that Driver Rutherford parked in a sleeping town...
...self-contained little world called Hassi Messaoud (Blessed Well): the waves that billowed around it were of sand, not of water. Hassi Messaoud, the Dawson City of the great French oil rush of 1959, lies deep in the barren wastes of the Sahara, 400 miles (or three days by truck) south of Algiers...
...shift near collapse. At Edjelé, welders putting together oil storage tanks learned that simply to touch the metal of the tanks meant a bad burn. The combination of Saharan sand and heat wears out mechanical equipment with startling rapidity; at Edjelé the average life of a Dodge truck engine is 7,500 miles...