Word: fire
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...grating, rasping jolt. Rankin hopefully eyed the slumping panel needles, tried vainly to coax juice from an emergency electrical generator to rouse his radio, kept his aircraft from nosing over into supersonic speed. But only for an instant; a hundred battle missions and a bail-out in enemy fire over Korea had honed his survival instincts, and Rankin knew the choice. To his wingman, Lieut. Herbert Nolan, he snapped a message over his faltering transmitter: "Power failure. May have to eject." To himself he said: "This is going to be a pretty high...
Fumes in Bedrooms. At first nobody worried much. But soon, noxious fumes containing a little carbon monoxide and a great deal of carbon dioxide began coming out of crevices. Firemen pointed their hoses down the biggest cracks; for a while the fumes turned to steam, but the fire burned on. In 1952 a sleeping couple was killed by fumes creeping into their bedroom. On one night in 1954, fifteen people were overcome. Since the fire started, several hundred residents of the parboiled area have been nauseated or knocked...
...state and federal governments tried to put out the fire by drilling 500 bore holes and pumping floods of silt-bearing water down them. But the deep-down fire still burned. The fumes got so bad that mine officials kept watch round the clock to waken residents in case of a sudden increase of escaping gas. They knew that the Lackawanna River, toward which the fire was eating its way, would be no barrier. The fire could pass under its bed, and eat its way under the city's business section on the far side...
...present agreement makes the stricken city an urban redevelopment district. Two million dollars will come from the Federal Government, $1,000,000 from the state. Homes and other real estate in the threatened area (130 acres) will be-bought at fair prices. Then massive dragline excavators will attack the fire by digging huge trenches around the burning coal...
Nasty Job. The first trenches will connect stripped-out areas and so make a perimeter beyond which the fire cannot spread. Then the draglines will work in ward, digging both burning and nonburn-ing coal from the whole 130 acres. Says Mining Engineer Robert W. Bell, consultant to the Carbondale Redevelopment Authority: "A nasty job-rather dangerous." While working on burning coal, the dragline operators will be only the length of their booms (60 to 90 ft.) away from the hot stuff. Each scoopful will be dumped on high ground and sprayed with water. In many places the hot surface...