Word: sump
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...floor of compacted clay approximately 40 ft. thick has been laid below the bottom of the hole. On top of this virtually impermeable bed, workmen are placing a plastic liner to be topped by a plastic-grid system that will collect and direct any seepage into a series of sump pumps. Above the grid will be another plastic liner, another layer of clay and yet more plastic. A plumbing system will pump rainwater out of the area. Nearby, the company is spending $1.6 million to improve its large surface collection tanks, made of concrete lined with epoxy, that receive waste...
...whorehouse over by La Grange-lil town, sleepy as a ole hound in the August sun, 'bout halfway 'tween Austin and Houston. The place was listed in the tax books as Edna's Ranch Boarding House, but everybody called it the Chicken Ranch. Well sir for sump'n like 80 years the Chicken Ranch was a place a man could call home whenever he needed to get outta his own house. Cowboys, cotton pickers, state senators, the Texas A&M football team, your more adventurous visiting clergy-they all come to Edna's place...
Inside nearby houses, thick, gummy substances began oozing through cellar walls and clogging sump pumps. Some houses were pervaded by strange smells that occupants said gave them headaches. Most puzzling, the incidence of serious illness, including cancer, was much higher in this neighborhood than in other areas of Niagara Falls. Miscarriages seemed to occur frequently; and so many children were born with birth defects that street signs were posted warning motorists of deaf youngsters. Two of Alice Kline's children are troubled; one is hyperactive, another developed an ulcer-like stomach condition at age seven. In an interview with...
Attanasio wondered whether he could call himself Hercules. Despite his skinny arms and pathetic inability to lose weight over the course of two decades, Attanasio had always fancied himself a lifter of weights, had put in the hours in the cellar, yeah, pumping with the sump pump. His uncle and eponym, he knew, had once been on the cover of Muscle magazine. So let us follow Hercules as he travels with Arnold...
...does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding cake"), his metaphors ("the minutes went by on tip toe with their fingers to their lips"), his fadeouts ("What did it matter where you lay ... in a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep") - indicated a mind larger than the ghetto of the detective story in which it was trapped...