Word: tinder
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...only was the Midwest as hot as the hinges of Hell. It was also tinder dry. It had been dry for five rainless months. Lake Michigan reached its lowest stage in a decade. The Mississippi was lower than it had ever been. On the Great Lakes, cargo boats went 25% light to get over the shoals. Aviators had to climb 5,000 ft. above Omaha to surmount sulphur-colored dust clouds. But the distress to navigators, airmen and city folk was nothing to the desperation of Midwestern farmers, as they watched their fields incinerate, their cattle actually perish of hunger...
Shortly after 4 p. m., the great hay barn of the Union Stock Yards & Transit Co. was touched off, authorities believe, by a cigaret butt flicked from careless fingers. The hay acted as a blow torch on the surrounding tinder-like constructions of sprawling Packingtown, the vast stockyards area on Chicago's Southwest Side. Almost daily fires are extinguished in Packingtown. But when the dreaded "all-out" 4-11 signal clanged through the city's firehouses, firemen knew that this was no ordinary stockyards blaze...
...these plague spots live some 1,500,000 people. Two, three, four families pack into one flat. In summer the heat is stifling. In winter icicles from burst plumbing form on the hall ceilings. Refuse piles up in airshafts 15 feet deep. Basements are cluttered with rags and tinder. The better tenements have one toilet to a floor, but when one block was recently razed, the only sanitary facility discovered was a row of holes in a board in the backyard. Garbage is tossed out windows. In some, a match struck in the halls will illumine the foul...
...does not inspire even the most moderate optimism," gloomed the conservative Kurjer Warszawski. But the also conservative Gazeta Polska hailed it as "one of the most important events of the last 15 years, in view of the fact that Polish-German relations have been generally regarded as the tinder box of Europe...
...throw his reverse lever because he knew he did not have time to make it work. He closed his eyes as his locomotive's snout struck the rear coach, buried itself eight feet inside. The two steel cars jounced forward thunderously, crunched the wooden car to tinder. From its splintered interior were removed all the wreck's dead (14), most of its injured...