Word: lande
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Soufriere Hills volcano spewed 150-m.p.h. molten rivers of lava, gas and ash down its flanks onto the villages below. As farmers tended to their carrot and cabbage fields, huge rocks showered on them and the scorching lava raced over the scalded ground. Ash-filled smoke plunged the land into darkness. There was nowhere to run. Nineteen people died, buried under tons of volcanic slag...
Under the growing pressure of subterranean steam against the mountain's molten core, the volcano's cap could eventually blow out entirely. Montserrat, not much more than a slender arc of farm and beach land surrounding the volcano, could virtually disappear. More likely, the mountain may keep on belching for months or years, slowly smothering the little island. Already it is a paradise lost for its citizens as fewer than 4,000 cling to their homeland. "If everyone leaves," says Radio Montserrat general manager Rose Willock, who lost her home a month ago, "Montserrat will become just another island that...
...them for their losses. Montserrat officials asked the British government to pay evacuees $14,800 for each head of household, $11,111 for each additional adult and $7,407 for each child, but islanders complain that even this is not enough to make a fresh start in a foreign land. Many are getting bills for mortgages on homes that no longer exist, and their debts are mounting. "What are we supposed to do?" said an irate policeman. "Leave here and go on the dole?" Last Wednesday more than 200 people marched on the home of the island's British Governor...
...coast, a rice-processing mill has no rice, so it is making noodles from seaweed. Every tractor, truck, wagon and ox-cart has been mobilized to distribute food aid as it comes in. Still, the pain is spreading across this country of 24 million as unremitting hunger stalks the land. Li Han, a Chinese truck driver who crosses the frontier regularly at Guchengli, has watched it. "People over there are starving," he says, "in rural areas and in the cities. Even the soldiers are not getting good food...
...summers swept the Stalinist hermit state to the edge of famine. Now the unending drought and extraordinary heat of 1997 have brought the real thing. Cornfields--at least the ones outsiders can see--are filled with stunted, shriveled plants. Paddy fields that should be blooming are sere and brown. Land normally planted lies barren; hillsides have been stripped of anything edible...