Word: rice
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...there were predictions that it would eventually triple or even quintuple. The cyclone was thus guaranteed its place as the 20th century's worst natural disaster. In all, the storm devastated a densely populated, 3,000-sq. mi. area, destroying 90% of the buildings and 90% of the rice crop. In some areas, TIME's Ghulam Malik reported last week, "it was like the beginning of life after Doomsday. People were wandering naked, wailing the names of kin who never responded. At Hatia, survivors wore rags that they found in ponds and ditches. And if they could find...
...this grotesque heap, a naked woman's broken body shuddered slightly." The team removed the woman, and managed to restore her to consciousness. Many of the living were almost crazed. At one point, an American helicopter bearing U.S. Ambassador Joseph S. Farland and 10-lb. sacks of rice, molasses and salt was nearly torn apart when it landed among starving Bengalis, who rushed the Ambassador and grabbed at the sacks. As the pilot swung into the air again, the tail rotor cut down three of the mob, seriously injuring them...
Privileged Families. Leaders of East Pakistan's Peking-and Moscow-oriented parties seized on the relief debacle to reinforce their demands for more autonomy for their region. The cyclone aftermath deepened the hate and envy felt by East Pakistan's dark, rice-eating Bengalis for the taller, fairer-and wealthier-wheat-eating Sindhis, Punjabis and Pathans of West Pakistan, the dominant half of the divided Moslem country. Anti-West Pakistan riots among the Bengalis forced ex-President Mohammad Ayub Khan into retirement last year. Successor Yahya, who has scheduled for next week the first general elections since Pakistan...
...horrendous devastation on every side. Oceangoing ships were torn apart in the turbulent bay or driven aground and left stranded. Beaches and whole islands were strewn with bodies. On 13 small islands near Patuakhali, not a single human being was left alive. Paddies were blackened with salt water, the rice crop destroyed. "It looks like a graveyard with no sign of life," an official reported after flying over Hatia Island. At one village, when a newsman asked why hundreds of bodies had been left unburied, a man cried: "We have buried 5,000 in mass graves. Our hands are aching...
...absence of official help, the survivors launched a relief effort of their own. From the air, the", could be seen building new huts and frying brine-soaked rice. In the past, many islanders have dreamed of building sea walls, but such vast undertakings have always been put aside as impracticable. "We can control the flood," said Pakistan's President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan last week, "but what can we do against the cyclone? We can only pray to Allah for mercy...