Word: earthen
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...round hut, made of roughhewn wood posts and a conical thatched roof, is known as zawya. In the Afar language, that means the house of the dead. Although it is not long after dawn, 26 bodies have already been wrapped in filthy burlap shrouds on the earthen floor. The air is sickly sweet with the smell of decay. Inside, in accordance with Muslim custom, Hussein Yussuf is tenderly washing the shriveled body of a three-year-old boy. "This is the first water this child has had for a long, long time," says the 60-year...
...fact, the Marines were withdrawn long before the embassy had been made secure. Officials knew that shatter-resistant windows, reinforced blast walls, earthen berms, and even simple gates were crucial to containing terrorist attacks. But they allowed the embassy personnel to move in before protective devices had been completely installed. Only a few easily negotiated concrete barriers stood between the killer-car and the embassy...
According to an account given by Nikolai Vasilyev, minister of land reclamation and water resources, the mishap occurred in September, when a 45-ft. by 80-ft. breach opened in a large earthen dam at a fertilizer plant in Stebnik, four miles southeast of the city of Drogobych, near the Polish and Czechoslovak borders. The break allowed a 20-ft.-high torrent of concentrated salty wastes from the plant to cascade down hillsides, sweeping away railroad tracks, ripping up roads, ruining farmlands, and smashing homes and workshops until it reached the Dniester River 15 miles away...
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...
Having scored that victory, the Iranians went no farther. Nor are they likely to. The reason: the broad, flat plain between the border and Amara is a maze of earthen walls and slit trenches. Hundreds upon hundreds of Soviet-built Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, guns and rocket launchers dot the eerie landscape, each hunkered down behind its own earth revetment. If the Iranians attempted to move toward Amara, they would invite the same decimation that they received in five full-scale attacks last summer, when wave upon wave of poorly trained Islamic Guards rushed across the flood plain...