Word: bum
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...they fled their mudbrick huts. Some desperately stripped off their dresses and shirts to escape the burning caused by the gas. Later they were found only yards from their crumpled clothes, overcome by asphyxiation. "I saw people dying, people dead all around," recalled Ephrem Ngong Kum, 24, of Su-Bum, a village some 200 miles northwest of Yaounde, Cameroon's capital. "They died in the houses, in streets, outside the forest, in the stream." Fellow Villager Chia David Wambong remembered a warm feeling, as if he were drunk. "Everyone started to cough, and some people vomited blood," he said...
...week's end the Cameroon army had laid to rest most of the populations of the three hardest-hit villages: Nios, Su-Bum and Cha. At least 300 people, many of them farmers from the surrounding hills, clogged the area's few hospitals, sharing beds with other victims while they awaited treatment for shock and burns. Perhaps another 3,000 refugees, displaced from their homes on the fringes of the affected 10-sq.-mi. area, were evacuated by army troops. All told, it was estimated that 20,000 lives were upended by the freakish disaster that was aptly, if ineloquently...
...lemon-shaped lake's depths. The village that shares the lake's name showed no signs of life, save the rescue crews. Of the hamlet's almost 1,200 residents, only four, including a woman and her child, are believed to have survived. Five miles away in Su- Bum, army troops found a scrawny chicken dancing a macabre two-step atop a freshly dug family grave. "All the people, the goats, the pigs and the cows died," said Lieut. General Tataw. "What surprises me is how that chicken survived...
Even the few who survived were knocked unconscious for what they believe was hours. When they awoke, they found the nightmare had only just begun. "Oh, they die plenty!" cried Peter Sam Kinbi, 42, of Su-Bum. "You go to one compound, and they all finished. You go to another compound, and there is one man and maybe one child living. They all dead. When you touch them, they be like stone and they be white spot (dried spittle) on they mouths and on the ground. My wife, my six children, all dead...
...animals were able to survive the deadly cloud. Colonel Michael Wiener, the physician who headed the Israeli medical team, speculated that survivors may have been positioned in air currents that somehow escaped contamination. At least one survivor's good fortune involved more than plain luck. Dennis Chin of Su-Bum told reporters that he had been lying on his bed when the choking gas descended. As he gasped for air, Chin dragged himself to a windowless shed behind his house, where presumably there was enough oxygen to enable him to wait out the calamity...