Word: tagliamento
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...have to give the river more space." Klement Tockner, an aquatic ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, agrees. "With heavy rainfalls, the problem with most rivers is that they are dammed in, so they rise instead of widening." Tockner cites the example of the Tagliamento River in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy. The river is 170 km long and up to 2 km wide in places. Although it often floods owing to heavy rainfall, it rarely rises more than 2 m above its average level because it's flanked on either side by meadows...
Most of the viewers by then had also begun to feel the tremors from Italy's worst earthquake since 1915. The epicenter was plotted in the Tagliamento River Valley, in the Dolomite foothills northeast of Venice, an Italian resort area and scene of bitter World War I battles. There 20 villages were badly battered by a light shock, followed by a major quake that lasted 55 seconds and measured a severe 6.9 on the Richter Scale; eleven more lesser tremors followed over a three-hour period. More than 700 people were killed under falling rubble before the shocks subsided...
Like ripples on a pond, the shock waves of Tagliamento quivered outward in a broad circle. In Venice, the campanile of St. Mark's trembled and the lagoon waters suddenly roiled. In Pisa, the Leaning Tower vibrated-but held its precarious tilt. On the Venice-Vienna railroad line, a train suddenly derailed as the tracks weaved out from under it. Shakes and masonry cracks were reported as far away as Frankfurt, Munich and the French town of Nancy...
...badly. After the disaster, Professor Raffaele Bendandi of the Faenza Geophysical Laboratory reported that seven or eight days before "the ground in northeastern Italy rose by 7.75 in., according to our instruments. This was a sign that we could expect some sort of tremor." The area along the Tagliamento is earthquake country of a sort. At the Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory in Monteporzio, Scientist Mariacecilia Spadea had already measured 20 or 30 minor shocks there this year. But, she said, "there was no history of severe earthquakes there in this century. It would have been impossible to predict a catastrophe...
...some, the decision comes with a shock of disgusted recognition, like a less heroic version of Hemingway's Lieut. Henry bidding a farewell to arms by jumping into the frigid Tagliamento River...