Word: flotsam
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...Jarrett approached the site, moving cautiously to avoid any mines, the crews spotted ten Iranians drifting in rubber rafts. Sixteen others, including four wounded sailors, were in the water, clinging to flotsam or still swimming. All were picked up. The survivors claimed that two of their crewmen were missing and that one had sped off in a motorized "Zodiac" speedboat. The Iran Ajr's captain, who spoke English, was among the wounded...
...Mexicali, Mexico, then back north into California. But it has made up for lost time. Says Gruenberg: "It's the most polluted water in California, and perhaps in the U.S." The Colorado connection has long since dried up, but a 75-mile river still flows, carrying its poisonous flotsam into California's bountiful Imperial Valley, past lettuce and cotton fields, and finally emptying into the Salton Sea, a popular fishing and swimming site near Palm Springs. Fishermen and residents alike have complained about pollution in the Salton Sea, and the U.S. Geological Survey stopped taking river samples two years...
...last swig of the bottle, and the cheap red wine contained flotsam from the mouths of three men gathered in a vacant lot in northeast Philadelphia. Moments before, a homeless and dying man named Gary had vomited. The stench and nausea were dulled only by exhaustion and the cold. Gary, wheezing noisily, his lips dripping with puke, was the last to drink from the half-gallon jug of Thunderbird before passing it on, but no one seemed to care. There was no way to avoid the honor of downing the last few drops. It was an offer to share extended...
...debris that despoiled Laysan's beaches had been washed ashore by the waters of the Pacific, which like other oceans is becoming increasingly fouled by plastic flotsam. But while the floating and beached plastic is unquestionably an eyesore, the problem goes far beyond aesthetics. At the Sixth International Ocean Disposal Symposium in Pacific Grove, Calif., last month, scientists reported that plastic trash is causing injury and death to countless marine animals that feast on it or become ensnared in it. Says Ecologist David Laist, of the Marine Mammal Commission: "Plastics may be as ! great a source of mortality among marine...
...known as tree people, after Fig Tree Park, a place many of them call home. Palms outstretched, the scruffy men and women beg from pedestrians on the main shopping artery. They urinate in alleys, rummage for food in supermarket dumpsters, snooze on store stoops. Their beer cans and assorted flotsam dot the lush green parks. They are Santa Barbara's homeless, perhaps 2,000 displaced people in a population of 75,000. The city's mostly retired, wealthy, conservative Establishment, although resigned to their presence, is determined to contain their numbers in the prosperous town just 29 miles from Ronald...