Word: plumed
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...only warning was a nocturnal rumble that resembled distant thunder. Then a silent plume of colorless gas shot up from the turbulent depths of Lake Nios, just inside Cameroon's northwest border. Within minutes, the heavy fumes of carbon dioxide burst over the rim and sank into the valley below, enveloping sleepy hamlets in a deadly bubble. Villagers who had already bedded down for the night quietly suffocated in their sleep...
...their habits, and far removed from the cunning and knavishness of modern man." By the early 18th century, a Swiss visitor to England noted a decline in hospitality: "When the people see a well-dressed person in the streets, especially if he is wearing a braided coat, a plume in his hat, or his hair tied in a bow, he will, without doubt, be called 'French dog' 20 times perhaps before he reaches his destination...
Residents of Miamisburg, Ohio, found last week that they couldn't go home again after all. Early in the week 15,000 of them were evacuated when 15 cars of a 44-car transport train derailed, causing a tanker filled with phosphorus to explode and spew a plume of noxious white smoke over the small city (pop. 18,000) ten miles southwest of Dayton. Local hospitals treated some 300 people for respiratory problems and eye irritations...
...close range, though, the radiation-bearing plume could be deadly. The immediate danger was, of course, greatest for those nearest the disaster. Said Kerry Dance, president of GA Technologies, a San Diego reactor builder: "The people who are in trouble are those right at the site." Henry Wagner, a professor of radiation health sciences at Johns Hopkins, speculated that local residents risked exposure to extreme doses of radiation that could cause cerebral hemorrhaging, nausea, vomiting and death within hours...
...outside air rushed in, oxygen in the atmosphere would have fueled a raging fire in the graphite, which burns like coal when ignited, throwing a plume of volatile radioactive elements into the air. U.S. officials calculated that the particulates and gases surged nearly a mile high, where they were caught by prevailing winds and then blown over a wide swath to the northwest...