Word: blazing
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...week's end 61 bodies had been recovered, many burned beyond identification. But the toll could reach more than 300, since 250 were still missing. It was, by any count, Brussels' worst fire and the most devastating one worldwide since 323 persons perished in a circus blaze in Brazil in 1961. Brussels Mayor Lucien Cooremans said that it would take a month or so to comb through the tangled debris, which still smoldered days later. Store officials estimated the property loss at $23 million...
...bitter brown haze. Smog shrouded Miami, and acrid smoke choked much of the rest of southern Florida. The magnificent Everglades National Park-the timeless, endless "river of grass"-was drying up like a farmer's mudhole in August, and the smallest spark quickly turned into a blaze...
...investigators worked for ten weeks. With 1,500 technicians assisting them, they painstakingly traced possible sources of trouble along 20 miles of electrical wiring, re-enacted the blaze in a mock-up spacecraft, exhaustively analyzed the innards of the burned Apollo spacecraft. NASA also stripped down two intact production models. In one, inspectors discovered more than 2,000 "squawks," or lapses in quality control. Hundreds of the complaints were of the paint-fleck variety, but there were also such serious flaws as improperly fitted electrical connections and exposed conductors...
...investigators acknowledged that the precise cause of the fire "most likely will never be positively identified," they said it was "most probably" caused by a faulty conductor in an equipment bay under Grissom's couch. Apparently, current from the conductor "arced"-or spurted-to another object, and the blaze began. Almost immediately, it raged out of control in the cabin's 100% oxygen atmosphere, which was capable of turning any spark into a conflagration. Some 70 Ibs. of inflammable materials such as nylon netting and chemical coolant fed the flames...
...that faulty wiring probably caused the fire. Pressed for alternatives, he blurted: "It has been theorized that Grissom could have kicked the wire that would have been attached to the gas chronometer." That would have caused an abrasion in the insulation and made possible the arc that ignited the blaze. When New York Democrat William Fitts Ryan angrily disputed that suggestion, McCarthy retreated. "I only brought it up as a hypothesis," he said...