Word: torrent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hawaii's Kilauea. Instead, the superheated magma within Nevado del Ruiz began to melt the thick blanket of snow and ice that caps the top 2,000 ft. of the peak. Filthy water started to flow down the sides of the mountain. The trickle swiftly turned into a torrent of viscous mud, stones, ashes and debris with a crest of 15 ft. to 50 ft. The liquid avalanche, known as a lahar, was soon hurtling down the steep slopes at speeds of up to 30 m.p.h. With irresistible force, it roared down the flanks of Nevado del Ruiz...
Some along the mountainside survived as the water surged by just below them in the valley. Farmer Valentino Tretter saw the cloud of white dust raised by the torrent and climbed above the valley road to investigate. "Soon after, the mud came across my garden and my barn," he recalled, "I shouted toward the house of the Vinante family, which is a little underneath mine, but in a few moments it was wiped away. Adriano, his wife Pauola and their three children--all are dead...
...rain. But when wet weather finally arrived this month, it proved to be yet another kind of curse. A heavy deluge produced flash floods that raced through long-dry riverbeds and rushed over brick-hard earth, turning airstrips into quagmires and rendering roads and rail lines impassable. The torrent washed out a vital railroad bridge that linked the region to Port Sudan, cutting off hundreds of thousands of famine victims from emergency food supplies...
...Salter, from Walla Walla, Washington, is so young that he called 29-year-old Sergeant Kyle Childress "Grandpa." "He always took care of me," says Salter, who lost two fingers when his platoon burst into a bombmaker's house near Samarra one night and was met with a torrent of machine-gun fire. As Childress fell, Salter emptied his M-4 rifle into the dark. The return fire raked his chest; his life was saved by his bulletproof vest. "For 48 hours after that, I was a train wreck, dumbfounded," he says, weeping softly in his four-bed hospital room...
This is why I’m upset with President Lawrence H. Summers for his ill-planned (and atrociously misinterpreted) remarks about women in science and engineering; the result for me has been a torrent of e-mails on open lists about the subject, all saying the same thing, none worth my reading...