Word: spills
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thing, these killers usually get caught without a coast-to-coast manhunt. Being inexperienced criminals, most end up tripping over their own stories. Then they spill all the sordid details to a tabloid or television program for enormous amounts of money...
...sanity screams at the innuendo, like a gull blackened in an oil spill. It wants to cleanse itself. The poet's version has the power of her black magic, her words on paper. "Where others saw roses," the nieces write, "Anne saw clots of blood." The sick, brilliant woman has the inestimable advantage of being dead and therefore beyond examination on questions of who abused whom...
...whole series of DNA identification tags. To foil counterfeiting, for instance, everything from paper currency to designer jeans and compact discs might be laced with DNA markers. Oil carried in tankers and toxic chemicals carried in trucks might similarly be "branded" by molecules of synthetic DNA. With PCR, a spill of unknown origin could then be traced back to the responsible party...
...environmentalists and sports fishermen watched in horror, a 10-mile lime green plume of death drifted slowly down the river, wiping out most of the ecosystem -- aquatic plants, nymphs, caddis flies, mayflies and at least 100,000 trout. Even more alarming to Californians was that the spill occurred 27 miles upstream of Lake Shasta, the state's largest man-made reservoir...
Fortunately, the long-term threat to humans is probably minimal. Lake Shasta holds 550 billion gal. of water and should easily absorb the spill. Health officials say the water is safe to drink. But the incident served as a reminder that no one living in a modern industrial society is safe from an environmental catastrophe like the one that befell the Sacramento. Each year more than 1.5 million carloads of poisons, solvents, pesticides and other hazardous materials are hauled across the U.S. by train. Given the sheer volume of traffic, accidental chemical releases are inevitable, and they occur...