Word: decks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...year-old boy, returning to his native Ningpo after his Shanghai employer had fled the country, had just fallen asleep in a crowded passageway. Suddenly the deck shot from under him, hurling him against a bulkhead, and an explosion roared through the ship. His first thought was "Communists" and he hid with his blanket over his head; but almost instantly he felt water rushing in. Although his leg was broken by the explosion, he managed to fight through the blackness to reach the top deck...
Within minutes the SS Kiangya had sunk in shallow water to the riverbed. Passengers on the lower decks had little chance for escape. Some 700 who managed to reach the safety of the top deck stood in cold water waisthigh, screaming for help.* One hysterical woman threw her child overboard because her husband was lost; others were pushed off in the struggle for standing room...
...Island, the gale struck. All that night, the Portland's paddle wheels thrashed vainly as giant seas battered her superstructure, drove her southward before the raging northeast wind. Elsewhere, 141 ships foundered. In the bitter cold and driving snow, men could not see across a ship's deck, had trouble getting their breath...
Roaches' Requiem. They sang over the ship's watercoolers and evaporators, over the food, coffee, soap bars and even the cockroaches of the storerooms. They sang particularly loud over the tarry caulking of the deck planks and spots of rust. The tuna fish made them sing, and so did the coral and the very sands of the lagoon. Oil streaks that had floated miles away remained menacingly hot. So insignificant was the salubrious effect of salt water that even the rocky ledges of neighboring atolls clung to their radioactivity in the teeth of foaming breakers...
...Navy, says Author Bradley, only admitted defeat when they found that they could not begin to "cool" a ship's exterior by a complete removal, by sandblasting, of every inch of paint, plus the planing off of a half-centimeter of all deck plank. And, to clinch matters, the Radiological Monitors found that even when radioactivity was not registering on ordinary instruments there might still be "free plutonium" present, the "most insidious poison known...