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...mountainside, flattening trees for miles around and turning the Toutle River into a flood of sludge that swept away several bridges. The eruption killed 34 people, demolished 178 homes and devastated hundreds of thousands of acres, much of it rich timber land. By the time the dust cleared, 150 sq. mi. of once green countryside lay lifeless, under what looked like a heavy fall of gray snow...
Larry Austgen, 31, of South Holland, Ill., is a contractor by trade, but a gambler by nature. Two years ago, Austgen built his first speculative house in suburban Chicago's posh Plum Valley: a luxury 2,400-sq.-ft. brick home guaranteed, he thought, to have the buyers lining up. Wrong. By the time it was built in August 1979, soaring mortgage rates and a souring real estate market had made a lemon of Austgen's plum. The house, appraised by realtors at $147,000, sat unsold for more than 18 months. Then Austgen had a sporting proposition...
...turbine breakdown at a Conrail power station, their trains into the city would be half an hour behind schedule. Fearing that the delays could be much longer, thousands of travelers took to their cars. But just as rush hour reached its bumper-to-bumper peak, a 4-sq.-ft. section of cement roadbed in the southbound lane of Manhattan's elevated West Side highway suddenly collapsed and tumbled to the ground below. While a repair crew patched the hole with a metal plate traffic backed up for three hours. Said one fatigued driver who reached his office at noon...
...Mexico, and 250 more are imperiled. Some choice species that sell for a few dollars each south of the border may fetch $50 or $60 at a Los Angeles nursery. Texas has no state law prohibiting the harvesting of cacti. While national preserves like the huge (1,100 sq. mi.) Big Bend National Park are protected by federal law, they are nonetheless havens for botanical bootleggers. "We don't know the numbers of cacti that are coming out of the state," sighs Dennie Miller, executive director of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute. "It could be a million a month...
...rash of mishaps involving salt domes. Last June methane gas exploded at a salt mine on Belle Isle, La., killing three miners and injuring 17 others. In November an oil-drilling rig accidentally punctured a salt-mine shaft under Jefferson Island, La., sending much of a 1.5-sq.-mi. lake gurgling down into the dome. The most frightening accidents have involved still another use of salt domes: as cheap, convenient storage tanks for crude-oil and natural-gas products. Last fall hundreds of people had to flee Mont Belvieu, Texas (pop. 2,700), which sits atop the largest such hydrocarbon...