Word: firetraps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite its mushroom crop of high-rise reinforced-concrete buildings, the city today is a worse firetrap than ever. Ichiro Uchibaba, an auto repairman who, as a boy of eight, survived the 1923 quake and firestorm, says: "It's worse today-these 2,000,000 cars and 3,000,-000 kerosene stoves in Tokyo are potential bombs. They would cause millions of fires...
...problems end there. Developments on steep slopes often are served by a single access road that by itself alters the natural flow of moisture. Moreover, with only one road for access, any subdivision can become a dangerous firetrap. "Many developers seem not to realize that fire runs uphill faster than on the flat," says Oscar Schmunk, deputy forester. Even now, the slopes are occasionally marked by the lonely stone chimneys of burned-out homes. The fire fighters call them "tombstones." They predict that within five years, if the present rush to live on the slopes continues, Colorado will have disastrous...
...Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed." Elsewhere, Bech vainly attempts to charm Yevtushenko by describing his own position in America not as a literary lion but as a "graying, furtively stylish rat indifferently permitted to gnaw and roam behind the wainscoting of a firetrap about to be demolished anyway...