Word: mined
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bombings and 7,258 personal injuries over the past three years, the tentative truce could of course easily be broken. Just how easily was shown at week's end. Three days before the ceasefire, three British soldiers were killed when their Jeep ran over a land mine, and a Catholic youth was shot dead by a sniper in Belfast...
...cable car was hurled like a giant cannonball from the No. 2 mine shaft of the Wankie Colliery in northwestern Rhodesia, burning a row of papaya trees before it came to rest 50 yds. away. That was the first sign of the disaster. An explosion, possibly emanating from a dynamite magazine, had devastated the major shaft of the mine that produced all of Rhodesia's coal. On or near the surface, four men were killed instantly. Hundreds of feet below, 426 miners -390 of them black, 36 white-were trapped amid rock and deadly methane and carbon monoxide fumes...
...seeping from the minehead. Police urged a crowd of moaning African women to move out of range. Eventually the officers of the colliery, which is owned by the AngloAmerican Corp. of South Africa, decided to clear the shaft by pumping air in to push the fumes deeper into the mine; the decision permitted the rescue effort to begin but inevitably reduced the chance of finding anyone alive...
There was never any sign of life in the three-mile tunnel. Rescue teams listened in vain for "pipe talk," the tapping of men who have somehow found sanctuary in pockets of fresh air. On the third day, the mine's manager, Sir Keith Acutt, announced that all hope was lost, adding, a bit speciously, that indications were that the missing men had "died instantaneously and were not aware of what had happened." The final death toll is expected to exceed 430, making Wankie the fifth worst coalmining disaster in history. At the mine-head, the wailing...
...turned out for a May 8 civil disobedience action at the John F. Kennedy Federal building in Boston at which 200 persons were arrested. But that night, President Nixon escalated the war against the North another notch, and antiwar sentiments were rekindled anew. His television announcement that he would mine the North Vietnamese ports prompted renewed plans for action, as Harvard students again prepared to disrupt their routines to stop what appeared briefly to be a mad march to the nuclear brink...