Word: agrounder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hymn to the brute force of nature. The scenes of hundreds swimming through storm waves in downtown Providence, of thousands fighting back flood waters in New London, Conn., of train crews outracing deadly tidal waves and of desperate sailors straining to keep their 1000-ton vessel from from running aground on inland railroad tracks--while perhaps not elegantly presented--are still awesome. To look for some deep meaning in a book like this seems absurd; what it presents is not a search for truth, but a portrayal of the more basic pursuit of survival...
...into the waters of the harbor. That minispill was certainly the least of the tanker accidents that have occurred in U.S. waters since mid-December, but no one could say it would be the last. On Dec. 15, when the Liberian-registered Argo Merchant went aground off Nantucket Island, Mass., and dumped 7.3 million gal. of oil into the sea, no fewer than ten tanker accidents had hit the headlines, including five that involved major losses...
...environmental threat that Kennedy described as "absolutely devastating." The record seemed to support that view. The latest incidents, suggesting a kind of seaborne demolition derby, were a grim finale to what has turned out to be the worst year ever for tanker accidents. Worldwide, 19 tankers sank, went aground or blew up in 1976-almost double the 1975 toll in tonnage. In the first nine months of last year alone, tankers spilled nearly 200,000 tons of oil in various mishaps...
Heavy Traffic. Last week two more accidents occurred. Another Liberian tanker, the Daphne, ran aground off Puerto Rico and still another, the Olympic Games, grounded and suffered a hull puncture during a docking maneuver at Marcus Hook, Pa. Moving downstream in a slick 32 miles long, its cargo seeped into marshes, coating wintering waterfowl with a sticky layer of oil that matted their feathers and robbed them of their insulating properties. Tens of thousands of birds were endangered...
Fortunately, major accidents involving tankers have been infrequent, but those that do occur are spectacular. The Liberian ship Torrey Canyon spilled over 30 million gal. of oil when it went aground off England's Cornwall coast in 1967. The Metula dumped about 16 million gal. of Persian Gulf crude when it grounded in 1974 in the Strait of Magellan, polluting an area where Charles Darwin had gone ashore more than a century earlier to study animals and plants. The Jacob Maersk lost or burned some 26 million gal. when it exploded off Portugal...