Word: overburden
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under Carbondale run four thick seams of anthracite coal. Over the years, mining operations honeycombed the earth beneath the city with tunnels. Where the seams came close enough to the hilly surface, great machines stripped away the worthless overburden, exposing the coal. The city government found abandoned stripping craters handy places to dump garbage and rubbish. The Hudson Coal Co. urged the city fathers to stop this sloppy practice, but its warning was ignored. In 1946 the rubbish started burning, and before it could be extinguished, the fire ignited the coal. Flames raced through hundreds of yards of abandoned...
...more than 20 kilotons could be identified clearly as manmade. To sum up, said the panel, the 180-station detection system might be confronted by 1,500, not 100, natural seismic shocks a year that could not be distinguished from an underground test explosion. This number would presumably overburden the checking system as presently outlined...
...other areas in the city. Some well-off families manage to slip into fine old neighborhoods like Germantown, where they keep well-run homes. But the net effect of the migration is to create new ghettos, drop real-estate values, drain tax revenues, lift the crime rate,† and overburden public schools (18 are all-Negro; in 50, Negroes comprise from 50% to 90% of the student bodies). "There are 60,000 units housing 200,000 people today," says Mayor Dilworth, "that are unfit for human habitation...
...pyramids the Egyptians created gigantic scientific instruments for measuring the solar year, building their sides trued to the four cardinal directions. Using the Egyptian year, Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. made the Julian calendar standard throughout the Roman world. To these scientific measurements, later calendar makers added an overburden of myth, magic and homely folklore with advice so complete that even the best day for cutting nails and hair was indicated...
Bethlehem invested some $20 million stripping off the overburden, constructing ore-loading docks at Picton, 64 miles to the south, and building a mill at the mine site to convert the low-grade (37.5%) ore to pellets testing 65% iron. With ready access to rail transport (through a specially built C.N.R. spur) and a 211-mile water haul through Lake Ontario, the mine emerged as an economical source of ore for Bethlehem's Lackawanna plant, near Buffalo...