Word: prieta
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...Onate, a Mexican border-police officer, knows he'll be busy as he eases his Dodge Ram along his country's porous border with the U.S. Soon his headlights pick out four scraggly youths preparing to scale the 12-ft.-high steel fence that separates the town of Agua Prieta from Douglas, Ariz. As he slows the pickup, the teenagers scatter like rabbits toward the sagebrush. "Wait! Don't run! We're not here to arrest you," yells Macias. "We want to help you. The problem is on the other side...
...them, arresting 90 in three years. But the special teams themselves are widely suspected, by migrants and U.S. lawmen, of taking payoffs from the smugglers. "They go after us, but they can be paid off," says Juan, 14, a smuggler's apprentice lounging in the courtyard of an Agua Prieta hotel that is bustling with people preparing to cross. The youngster collects $50 a head for leading migrants the last few hundred yards over the border...
...liquefaction. Quake vibrations rupture the surface, allowing water-saturated soil to rise up and turn what seemed to be solid ground into something like a quaking bowl of Jell-O. In both Kobe and the Marina district of San Francisco, site of the worst damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, liquefaction proved disastrous; the same could happen in the Oakland area across San Francisco Bay. Warns Ross Stein, Geological Survey physicist in Menlo Park, California: ``Kobe is almost a dress rehearsal for an earthquake on the Hayward fault in the East...
...Angeles there is only one rather minor incentive to retrofit: low-cost city loans to repair unreinforced masonry. San Francisco, says Iwan, more than five years after the Loma Prieta quake, is ``having a great deal of difficulty implementing anywhere near the kinds of retrofit regulations and laws that Southern California has,'' even though ``there are some very hazardous buildings there,'' many concentrated around Chinatown. In an era of government cutbacks, neither the state nor Washington seems likely to foot the bill. Insurance companies are not much help either. After picking up about half of the $20 billion losses from...
...fallout in Los Angeles so severe and prolonged compared with San Francisco's experience in 1989? Experts give several reasons. Despite its higher intensity and death toll, the Loma Prieta quake inflicted only 10 aftershocks of 3.5 or greater magnitude, compared with more than 150 in L.A. But the main cause is probably L.A.'s "layered" collective trauma. "Previous traumatic experiences have not yet worked themselves out," says psychologist Michael Gellert. "This makes three catastrophes in a year and a half: the riots and their atmosphere of tension perpetuated by the trials, then the fire storms just a couple...