Word: dead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shops in the city were closed, and on every street people were lying in the gutters. They were dead, humped in agonized frozen postures, like birds shot from the sky. In their midst were real birds, vultures flapping their wings and shrieking at the wild-looking dogs to keep their distance. The dogs growled and waited their chance; when the vultures swooped away, the dogs would charge in and tear off pieces of flesh. Roaming through the streets, rescuing the dead from the predators, were rifle-toting soldiers of the Indian army, who were joined by volunteer vigilantes carrying long...
...army was there too, keeping the human traffic flowing without the usual pushing and shoving. The troops had set up 60 tents, which became instant wards for 20 people each. Some distance away, the army had set up a morgue to which the patrols in the city brought the dead to be identified. Hindus were sent for cremation and Muslims for burial...
...those who died, there was no solitude. The traditional Hindu rite of cremation is one body, one pyre. But there were too many dead, and not enough firewood. The only solution was to place the dead, wrapped in cotton shrouds and covered with flowers, as many as five or six corpses together, on one pyre. As a result, huge fires burned all night long, sending smoke and flames arching up the sky as if death had become a permanent part of the countryside...
...away. Flames leaped 700 ft. to a nearby Monsanto plant that produced styrene, a combustible ingredient of synthetic rubber. Minutes later the Monsanto plant exploded, setting off fires throughout the city. On April 17 the freighter High Flyer, also loaded with nitrates, exploded in the harbor. The toll: 576 dead, 2,000 seriously injured...
Residents of West Virginia's Kanawha Valley complain about the putrid smell that sometimes hangs over the area, comparing it to the odor of dead rats and rotten cabbage. But to many locals the sulfurous aromas spewing from a dozen plants spread along a 30-mile section known locally as Chemical Valley are still "the smell of meat and potatoes." That is because these factories pay the wages of 10,000 people in a state that suffers the highest unemployment rate in the nation (16%). Says Bob Harbert, 36, a cab driver in Nitro, W. Va. (named...