Word: sulphureous
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...third largest port in the U.S. (behind New York and New Orleans). In the 1920s, oil discoveries near by set off an oil boom that has never ended. When the U.S. war machine needed rubber during World War II. Houston turned to the area's oil, salt and sulphur resources and built massive petrochemical plants to produce synthetics. Far from slowing down after the war, the city's growth boomed: in the decade of the 1950s, the population soared...
...cleaning proved to be better suited for such bulky items as blankets and draperies than for men's suits and outerwear. Fulltime attendants (often required by local laws) sent up labor costs. Electric bills were high, and machines frequently proved unreliable. Clothes often came out smelling like sulphur. Many began to echo the wry dismay of Irwin Gott, a Houston jeweler-turned-drycleaner: "I didn't intend this to be a nonprofit corporation; it just turned out that...
...Coast Guard conducted its investigation last week, the mystery seemed to lie less in the fact that the Sulphur Queen had disappeared than in wonderment about how it had ever managed to put to sea in the first place...
Corrosion. The ship was a firetrap. Former crewmen, along with a few who had been on vacation when the Queen sailed on its last voyage, testified that leaks occurred regularly in spaces beneath and at the sides of the four big sulphur tanks. Recurring fires in those places had become so commonplace that the ship's officers even gave up sounding the fire alarm. Emitting a gaseous, rotten-egg stink, the fires burned on and on. When the flames were extinguished, the sulphur cooled, hardened, and caked at the ship's pumps, corroded electrical equipment...
...scheduled for a drydock inspection in January, the visit was postponed. The Queen, one of the T-2 tankers of World War II vintage, had a characteristic "weak back," and had to be checked carefully for keel fractures. The drydock inspection was postponed, said Fike, because Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., to whom the ship was chartered, "was behind in its orders of sulphur. The captain was surprised and disappointed...