Word: river
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...likely to be the final demand on the Colorado River's bounty. No reclamation work even close to CAP's size is currently planned; Congress, mindful of criticism of pork-barrel projects, has not authorized a major new water program since 1976. Yet Lamm's own state is likely to need more water by the end of the century. Congress has funded parts of an ongoing $1.2 billion reclamation project in Utah that would involve the Colorado's water. Since the river's harvest is fixed, and already overal-located, experts warn that the only way to accommodate these...
Some 30 miles from Nevado del Ruiz, in the Lagunilla River canyon, lay Armero. A thriving agricultural center of whitewashed, tile-roofed homes and pastel colonial churches, the town had taken little part in the more turbulent eras of modern Colombian history. The region's wealth is based on cotton and rice farming. The surrounding Lagunilla River canyon contains some of the country's finest agricultural land...
Many of Armero's residents probably never knew their prosperity was the result of Nevado del Ruiz's last eruption. On Feb. 19, 1845, according to Colombian Historian Rafael Gómez Picón, "subterranean sounds emanated from the upper part of the ... river on the slopes of the snowcapped volcano . . . accompanied by a series of slight quakes. Suddenly, out of the canyon wherein the Lagunilla River flows, an enormous and strange torrent of thick mud became dislodged at tremendous velocity. It dragged with it great blocks of snow, debris, trees and sand." According to Gómez's chronicle, the mudslide...
...avalanche poured down on Armero, it gained additional ferocity from several sources. Three days of torrential rains had greatly swollen the Lagunilla River, which was already choked with mudslides from the volcano's tentative stirrings in September. At that time geologists from the surrounding federal department of Tolima had expressed concern about the dangers from the dammed-up river. At first the departmental governor, Eduardo Alzate García, said that "there are no immediate risks." Two days later he changed his mind. The geologists declared the region at the base of the volcano a local emergency area, and Alzate planned...
...mudslide that entombed Rodríguez cut through Armero like a liquid scythe. Henao later recollected that the wave "rolled into town with a moaning sound, like some sort of monster." Luckily, her home was on a hill. "Houses below us started cracking under the advance of the river of mud," she recalled. She grabbed her children and climbed to the roof of her home. As they watched, more than 80% of the roughly 4,200 buildings in Armero simply vanished into the torrents of slime. Said she: "It seemed like the end of the world...