Word: plumed
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...changed into running shoes and looked for a way out. She jumped down from a hole punched in the wall and stumbled forward, smoke coming out of her clothes. An agent spotted her, climbed out of his armored vehicle and ran to her, disappearing into a black plume. By the time he reached her, she was trying to get back inside with her friends and struggled to fight him off, apparently determined to find her way to heaven through hell. "Where are the kids? What did you do with them?" the agent yelled, but she just shook her head...
...plume of dust, the central dome of an ancient Muslim mosque in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh collapsed under the blows of 4,000 Hindu fanatics last week -- and shook the subcontinent to its foundations. Like the three domes that crowned the 464-year-old Babri mosque, the three pillars of the modern Indian state -- democracy, secularism and the rule of law -- are now at risk from the fury of religious nationalism...
...dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure is so unsteady that a strong windstorm could smash it, sending a plume of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. "Nothing is being done to clean it up," says Alex Sich, an American engineer who has studied the Chernobyl site...
Paint-stripping and engine-maintenance operations present a more formidable challenge. At the Naval Air Engineering Center in Lakehurst, New Jersey, a plume of water contaminated by TCE solvent is leaking into the aquifer that supplies water to the southern part of the state. Investigations at the Norfolk Naval Base complex in Virginia are only partly completed, but it already appears that the Navy's biggest single installation may turn out to be its biggest contamination problem...
...comet or an asteroid strike about 65 million years ago is the favored explanation for why dinosaurs vanished from the earth so abruptly after having dominated the planet for the preceding 70 million years. The tremendous plume of smoke and dust thrown into the atmosphere by the space intruder's impact, equivalent to perhaps a million hydrogen bombs, would have blocked out sunlight for months. The globe would have gone into a dark, deep freeze, killing first the plants and then the giant lizards that fed on them, directly or indirectly -- paving the way for mammals, and eventually humans...