Word: managua
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...many of its older survivors knew from firsthand experience, Managua was disaster-prone. In 1885 and again in 1931, the city was virtually leveled by quakes, with heavy loss of life (some 1,450 died in the 1931 catastrophe). Lying along the "circle of fire," a ring of volcanoes and seismic fault lines that encircles the Pacific from the Aleutians down through the western rim of the Americas to New Zealand and up through Japan, Central America is frequently shaken by geologic turbulence...
Overlaying the natural tragedy were varying degrees of human confusion, venality and selfless generosity. Hoping to force out the 150,000 or so who stubbornly refused to leave Managua, and thus reduce the chances of an outbreak of disease, the government at first refused to bring food into the city. As a result, emergency food supplies flown in by various relief organizations piled up in hangars at Managua's Las Mercedes Airport while profiteers within the city sold bread at $2 a loaf and water and soft drinks at $2 a bottle (the water in Lake Managua...
...Even as Managua still smoldered, the Somoza regime began pondering reconstruction. Money posed no great problem; the Nixon Administration, which is anxious to burnish Washington's tarnished image in Latin America, would almost certainly be eager to help bankroll the building of a new capital. But where? Managua was now a three-time loser, it was true, but Leon, the country's second city (pop. 50,000), also lies in an earthquake zone...
MEASURED on a human Richter scale, the Managua earthquake ranks as one of history's more modest seismic upheavals. In 1556 a quake collapsed thousands of cave dwellings in the cliffs of China's Shensi province, killing an estimated 830,000 peasants. In 1755 more than 50,000 died in a series of tremors that destroyed the city of Lisbon and inspired Voltaire to compose his moving Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake...
When the ground began to heave beneath doomed Managua, Nicaragua (see THE WORLD), Howard Hughes was sound asleep in his hotel which promptly began to swoon. "Cool, so cool," as one aide put it, the phantom of high finance ducked out through falling debris and then spent his 67th birthday camping out in a nearby field. Looking for more comfortable surroundings, he summoned a private jet and flew off to London where he took over a whole floor of a hotel for $2,500 a day. A Hughes aide hinted, however, that the boss might soon emerge from this...