Word: lavas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...turn to summer until the Fourth of July. And in fact not all of the omens for the holiday were grim. San Diego was shaken by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded there (4.6 on the Richter scale), but only some vases and plumbing were broken. Neither the new lava flow from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano nor the tornadoes that swirled through eastern Iowa and northern Illinois killed anyone. Not good news, but not disasters either: if those were acts of God, at least he pulled his punches. -By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Steven Holmes/Hoover Dam, with other bureaus
...charge of the detonation attempt, the first of its kind in Italy, was Rolf Lennart Abersten, 46, a Swedish engineer who has worked in Milan as an explosives specialist for the past eleven years. The temperature of lava sometimes reaches some 1800° F; to prevent the heat from setting off the charges, Abersten and his associates devised an ingenious protective system. It called for installation of four rows of steel tubes in the west side of the old lava wall (lava from the eruption was moving along the wall's east side). Each of the metal tubes contained...
Unfortunately, before the explosives were ready for detonation, the flowing lava slopped over the wall and temporarily clogged some of the tubes; that added a great deal of new weight to the wall, as well as considerable heat. Abersten could not use the bottom row of explosives because they had become too hot, despite their protective coverings. The total force of the charges dropped from...
...into the sooty sky above the site. A military bugler tooted a few short notes. Then came the first blast, shaking nearby sandbagged bunkers, where dozens of journalists and officials huddled. It was followed by a second blast, and a third. A portion of the wall crumbled. Some flaming lava poured down the new channel and into the depression, but much of the lava continued down the old path. Only a portion of the molten rock had been diverted. Within four days, the artificial channel had dried up completely...
...volcano last week showed contempt for those trying to conquer its fireworks: it released a poisonous cloud that swept workers from its slopes, showered gray ash on the nearby town of Giarre and sent a new river of lava toward the Rifugio di Sapienza, a tourist shelter it had damaged earlier in the spring. Engineer Abersten, weary but unbowed, warned that another precision blast would be required to make the diversion an unqualified success. Said he: "I don't want to be defeated by Etna...