Word: thicke
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...academic skepticism is thick. The Carter people scoff; they tried the same thing and failed. Conventional wisdom suggests that Government is too complex these days for Cabinet officers to have true authority. The problems, say the experts, cut through several departments and agencies and only the White House can arbitrate them. In that environment, Presidents turn to the men nearest them. Aides become, in effect, Cabinet members...
...next floor used by hotel guards to monitor the gambling in the casino. The flames raced along the catwalk and then swept down and back across the casino. Except for the twelve people killed in the casino, most of the deaths took place on the upper floors, when thick, black smoke mixed with poisonous gases from the casino's burning plastic decorations swirled upward through air ducts, stair wells and elevator shafts...
...York City, for example, hotels are required to have a system of water pumps and hoses, sprinklers on floors below ground level, an alarm system and a watchman on duty 24 hours a day. Even though many New York hotels were built before World War II and thus have thick walls, windows that open and other safety features, Assistant Fire Chief John Fogarty is worried. "We have at least one hotel fire a day," he says. "We're not free from the possibility of a major catastrophe...
...that two recent quakes were warnings from an angry deity. Today, scientists prefer another explanation, an all-encompassing view of the earth known as the theory of plate tectonics. It holds that the planet's surface consists of a dozen or so restless plates, each about 70 miles thick. Their movements explain volcanoes, the rise of mountains and the drift of continents. They account for quakes as well, most of which seem to occur where the great plates meet-at the so-called Ring of Fire, for instance, the tremor-and volcano-prone region that rims the Pacific Ocean...
Near Golden, Colo., at the Department of Energy's Rocky Flats plant, a technician pushes a red button marked REQUEST TRANSFER. Behind a 10-in.-thick concrete wall, a pair of claws reaches out to grasp a stainless steel container filled with pink powder, then lifts it into a furnace where it is baked at 950° F until it turns into a nondescript gray button three inches in diameter. Such a button could be worth $100,000, for the job of this robot, which goes into regular operation in a few months, is transporting reprocessed plutonium...