Word: dammed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Dams. A bursting dam can be a mass killer. The U.S., by great good luck, has not suffered such a tragedy since Nov. 6, 1977, when an earthen dam in Georgia gave way after a 5-in. rainfall and unleashed a 30-ft.-high wall of water on Toccoa Falls Bible College, killing 39 people. But the danger remains. The Army Corps of Engineers classifies 8,794 of the nation's 65,500 nonfederal dams as unsafe...
...Southern California, eight dams in the San Gabriel Mountains were found to be vulnerable to earthquake tremors if their reservoirs were filled. To avoid that danger, water levels are kept low, even after rainstorms, when dam gates are opened. "We lose a lot of water to the ocean," says Jim Easton, an engineer in the district. In the low-lying Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a 1,000-mile system of dikes, made of sand and peat, has been sinking as the peat oxidizes. Six levees have collapsed since 1980, inundating some of the delta islands. The local water districts cannot...
After heavy storms two years ago, the Salt River nearly topped Arizona's Stewart Mountain Dam, threatening to flood parts of Phoenix. State officials even feared a total collapse of Stewart. "We felt it was imminent," recalls Reid Teeples , a Salt River project official...
Aside from export setbacks-prices for copper and cobalt dropped sharply-much of the loan money that flowed in was not spent wisely. Among Mobutu's development projects was a huge undertaking to dam the Zaïre River and to build a 1,100-mile-long power line to the Shaba copper-producing region at a total estimated cost of about $1 billion. Eight months after the power was finally turned on in 1981, the current was switched off. Shaba province happens to be self-sufficient in electricity. Says one Western diplomat: "If ever there was a white...
Those were words he lived by to the end. His motto, in Polish, was "Nie dam sie" (I shall never give in), and he never did. "Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me," he once said. "Music is me. I think I can say no man has lived his life more fully than I have. My life is made. If I die today, still, I've had it. Nobody can say I've been deprived of anything." Of some men it is said that they lived for their art; Rubinstein's life...