Word: flooded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like Camille in 1969, a rare Category 5 hurricane, as it smashed into the Yucatan at dawn on Wednesday. In the flashy resort city of Cancun, authorities evacuated several thousand people, mostly vacationers. But the poor had no place to go. Winds leveled their often flimsy dwellings, and flood tides washed them away. Some 30,000 were left homeless in Yucatan state and about 10,000 more in Campeche on the peninsula's west coast...
...because they don't even have rocks in Bangladesh." WFP has been donating millions of dollars' worth of wheat a year to the Dhaka government, which gives it to laborers for building dikes in a food-for-work program. Laments Andrei Filotti, a hydraulic engineer who advises Dhaka on flood containment: "We have poured $200 million into these dikes and drainage canals since the mid-1970s, and now there's not much left. We're trying to fight some of the biggest rivers in the world with simple / earth...
Those rivers were already at normal flood levels by mid-August, when one- fifth of Bangladesh is typically covered by floodwaters. Late in the month a sudden and intense rainfall centered in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sent an additional torrent surging southward into the Brahmaputra. Only at the end of August did Dhaka officials realize the magnitude of the danger. Admits Ershad: "We were taken by surprise -- that so much water could come." By Sept. 3, nearly every measuring station on the Brahmaputra had registered record levels...
...however, the government faces the all but impossible tasks of distributing emergency food aid to tens of millions of people and preparing for the epidemics that are sure to follow. Already hospitals are filled with victims of flood-related diseases, and raw sewage is contaminating water supplies throughout the country. "God willing, we will not allow anybody to starve," Ershad assured his countrymen during his helicopter visits, though he later remarked to foreign journalists, "How can you feed 30 million people? But we're trying our best...
...summer that the earth struck back. Amid an unnerving global heat wave, scientists took the planet's temperature and debated whether the greenhouse effect had already begun. At the beach, syringes replaced seashells. The wholesale destruction of forests in northern India and Nepal helped spawn a tragic flood in Bangladesh. Sturgeon were infected by toxic wastes in the Soviet Union, threatening the caviar supply. And, belatedly, the environment returned as a compelling political issue...