Word: oak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WILLIAM REID WAS NEW TO Oak Ridge, Tenn., and disturbed by what he was seeing. Soon after he joined the staff of Methodist Medical Center in early 1991, he was treating four patients with kidney cancers, an unusually large number for one small area, and a cluster of other people who appeared to have weakened ability to ward off infections. Reid suspected that something in the local environment was attacking the residents' immune systems...
...didn't take much imagination for Reid to figure out possible sources of contamination. For 49 years, federal installations at Oak Ridge have manufactured the innards of nuclear bombs. In the process, the plants have produced -- and carelessly disposed of -- mountains of radioactive material and hazardous wastes. Even the U.S. government admits the Oak Ridge labs have littered the surrounding countryside with everything from asbestos and mercury to enriched uranium. The story is much the same at all the country's now notorious nuclear weapons plants, scattered from Hanford, Wash., to Los Alamos, N. Mex., to the Savannah River plant...
Could a health disaster be hitting Oak Ridge? Reid was determined to find out. Last August he called Martin Marietta Corp., which took over management of the government's nuclear complex from Union Carbide in 1984. The doctor wanted to report his concerns and ask what chemicals he should test for in his patients. If Reid thought that Martin Marietta and his employers at Methodist Medical Center would appreciate his initiative, he was wrong. Three weeks later, the hospital began a disciplinary process aimed at forcing him off the staff. The doctor suspects that the hospital and Martin Marietta were...
...good works range from sending in a SWAT team of tree experts to try to save Austin's beloved old Treaty Oak after some nut poisoned it (tree died anyway) to quietly helping the families of MIAS and other veterans...
...fair's green themes seem more with-it. Hungary's folkish, quasi- ecclesiastical pavilion was built out of Hungarian lumber by an imported team of Hungarian carpenters; it has a solitary, mysterious-looking hydroponic oak tree growing inside. The Netherlands' eco-pavilion is exemplary, novel and fun. An open steel superstructure crisscrossed by escalators and ramps, this not-quite-a-building is wrapped, as if by a Whole Earth Christo, in perpetually waterlogged canvas netting, meant to cool the interior by 10 degrees or more. Expo '92, like the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs, also has its obligatory giant...