Word: blazing
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...death toll from a devastating fire last Feb. 25 in the shantytown-or favela-of Vila Soco, in the southern Brazilian town of Cubatao, was simply too low. Only 86 bodies were recovered after a gasoline-fed blaze exploded into a giant fireball that looked like an atomic mushroom cloud. Yet some 9,000 people lived in Vila SocÓ, a patchwork of wooden shacks built on stilts over a marshy swamp. Coroner Carlos Affonso Figueiredo found it strange that no bodies of children under five years of age had been discovered among the ashes and in the hot rubble...
...month, Figueiredo and his colleagues confirmed what they had feared. Based on the number of shacks destroyed and the average number of people per family, Figueiredo estimated that 300 children under five must have been killed in the fire. They eventually estimated more than 500 people dead. Because the blaze was fed by a highly combustible octane that caused the fireball to reach 1,000° C, he deduced that the children had been incinerated. "The bodies of young children trapped in the blaze were literally cremated," he said. "And since whole families were killed, there...
Every eleven years the sun's outer layers erupt in a blaze of turbulent magnetic storms, characterized by an increase in sunspots and fiery explosions known as solar flares. In February 1980, on the eve of one such outburst, NASA launched an instrument-packed scientific satellite called the Solar Maximum Mission. Nicknamed Solar Max, the spacecraft was to photograph and monitor the sun's activity, which even at a distance of 93 million miles can disrupt global communications and power transmissions, influence weather and endanger space voyagers...
Some students admitted that they were tempted to stay in bed through the alarm and that they took their time leaving the dorm. No one was injured in the blaze...
...first blaze started in the archives area of the concrete-and-glass building and spread quickly through dozens of offices on seven floors, destroying tons of documents and causing some $640 million in damage. Even as it was being brought under control, several smaller fires broke out in other parts of the building. Those blazes were contained, and there were no injuries. After determining that large quantities of a flammable liquid had been splashed on walls throughout the building and finding several unused crude paper torches, investigators quickly blamed the fires on arsonists. UNESCO Director-General Amadou Mahtar...