Word: blasts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After 120 Bombings. Within minutes of the blast, fire crackled around highly volatile chemicals. Survivors staggered out of buildings from which black smoke billowed. They could hear the moans of those trapped inside. But there was no panic, no screaming. To the workers this was an old, familiar story. In 1921, more than 80% of the northern third of the vast plant at Oppau, three miles northwest of Ludwigshafen, had gone up in one terrible roar that took 565 lives. Just five years-minus one day-before this week's explosion, a similar blast had taken 73 lives. During...
...blast that lifted Heuszler and threw him against a wall last week destroyed 18 buildings in the 8-sq. mile factory of Germany's biggest chemical works, the I.G. Farben plant at Ludwigshafen in the French Zone, producers of nitrogen fertilizer, varnishes and dyes. At least 180 were killed, 2,500 injured, and 70 were still missing this week...
...townspeople of Ludwigshafen, half of whom rely at least indirectly on the plant for their living, also showed a noticeable lack of panic. When the blast disintegrated windows in houses as far as five miles away, the people poked their heads through the empty frames, looked up at the monster column of billowing black smoke, and yelled across to one another: "So, it is the factory again...
...Reckoning. Within a couple of hours of the blast, hundreds of U.S. soldiers sped over the rickety Rhine bridge from Mannheim in the U.S. zone to bring help. They came with bulldozers to cut a path through the debris, with giant cranes to lift twisted girders off the dead and dying, with gas masks which proved invaluable when chemical fumes threw back rescue workers. As the fires raged on into the night, these G.I.s, led by quiet little Lieut. Colonel Walter F. Partin of Nashville, Tenn., worked without pause, performing a thousand acts of heroism in the smoke & flames. Bulldozing...
Whatever had caused the blast, its effects, were calculable-and immense. Laurence Wilkinson, U.S. Military Government Economics Director, said: "The. loss of the plant will require an entire recalculation of the industrial program for Western Germany...