Word: dead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Others tried to outrun the deadly cloud, overturning tables, chairs and cooking pots as 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...
Meanwhile, the Cameroon army struggled to navigate bulldozers over the precipitous mountain climbs and into the villages to dig graves for the dead livestock. But the primitive dirt tracks, which provide the only access to the hamlets for some 40 miles around, were muddied by pelting rains. Therefore the burials were slowed considerably while troops laboriously dug the graves by hand. Officials began to fear that the bloated carcasses of cows, goats, pigs and chickens rotting in the equatorial heat would lead to a cholera or typhoid epidemic. Army efforts were further hampered by the handful of survivors who refused...
...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...
Word of the tragedy did not reach the town of Wum, just ten miles west, until late the next afternoon. A government employee who had been motorcycling to Nios from Wum first discovered the disaster. When he came upon a dead antelope, he thought he had had a stroke of luck, and happily strapped the animal to his bike. But when he got closer to Nios, the impact of what had happened struck him as he saw more and more bodies of people and animals. Fighting back dizziness, he returned to Wum. Late that day, his ghastly report finally reached...
Police sources said all the dead worshipers were Turkish men, and Akbulut said most were elderly. However, Anatolia said the dead included an unidentified visiting rabbi from Israel...