Word: dig
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Balakot, Pakistan, a town of 20,000 people that was reduced to a muddy smear, it took the army three days to arrive, even though its base is only 20 miles away. When troops finally converged on a collapsed school building to help dig out some 200 students trapped inside, enraged parents hurled stones at the soldiers. As choppers touched down in wrecked mountain hamlets, survivors mobbed the crews and fought one another for blankets and biscuits. Some Pakistani officials reported that several times stranded earthquake victims clung to a chopper as it lifted off, nearly causing it to crash...
...many cases, people didn't wait for the army. Thousands of volunteers headed into the mountains, carrying shovels, pickaxes and iron rods to dig for survivors. Down in the main cities, well-wishers donated tents, blankets, food and even cloth for burial shrouds. Among the first responders were militant Islamic groups, who seized on the catastrophe to blame Musharraf's alliance with the U.S. in the war on terrorism for incurring Allah's wrath. In Chehla Bandi village, members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an outlawed group sympathetic to al-Qaeda, cooked food, helped bury the dead and shoveled through...
...bottom of narrow and steep valleys. McFadden and the others carried out as many missions as they could between daybreak to sundown. They were grounded temporarily on Tuesday afternoon when thunder and hail lashed the region. Otherwise, they have constantly ferried foreign rescue workers up into the mountains to dig for survivors in villages that melted away like sand castles when the earthquake hit. McFadden and his colleagues dumped out tents, medical supplies and food to desperate mobs of survivors who lunged into the chopper, fighting each other for the relief bundles. Some Pakistani officials say that several times, desperate...
...dazed and desperate that, even four days after the earthquake, he still hadn't washed the blood of his students off his cream-colored trousers as he wandered from one cluster of soldiers to another, pleading that they come back to his village and help him dig out his students. But there was still too much work to be done in Balakot before the soldiers could follow the teacher up into the mountains. And by then, as the soldiers and the teacher know, there won't be anyone under the rubble who is still left alive...
...every thought is filled by the image of Sohil, running along a narrow lane between Qumayon?s two houses, as the walls bulged and burst into rivers of rocks and dust, swallowing the boy. ?We kept trying to dig him out,? says Qumayom, ?but every time we went back, the ground would shake again and we would run away.? He adds, blankly: ?We were afraid...