Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fact remains that the majority of young American Samoans leave the island within a year of graduation, often to return disenchanted with both the mainland and their island homeland. And alcoholism is a perennial concern in a country where beer sometimes seems as much in abundance as water. In the cricket-chattering dusk, John Kneubuhl, a grand old man of the island, who went from here to Yale and then to a screenwriting career in Hollywood, recalls how he used to play hide-and-seek in the ghost-filled dark as a boy. Now, he says, traditions are fading...
...from urban sprawl, now lies almost in the shadow of modern apartment buildings. Nearby factories and old vehicles spew forth noxious clouds of particulate-laden exhaust, which becomes corrosive when dissolved by rain. Vibrations from traffic produce cracks in the monuments. More serious still is the damage caused by water. An estimated 80% of Cairo's incoming water supply escapes from leaking pipes into the ground. And the aging sewerage system, built 75 years ago to serve a population of half a million, is choking on the wastes of 13 million. Much of the wastewater overflows into the soil...
...resulting rise in the water table gradually undermines the foundations of buildings, causing them to list and even collapse. In 1987, according to Luis Monreal, director of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, at least one house fell down in old Cairo every day. "The damage is irretrievable," he says...
Many experts believe the ground-water problems have been exacerbated by the Aswan High Dam. Completed in 1970, it stopped the annual flooding of the Nile and made much more land available for agriculture. But the extensive irrigation used to make that land arable, along with poor drainage, has helped cause the rise in the water table's average level...
...groundwater rises, it dissolves mineral salts from the soil and bedrock. Ancient buildings, many made of porous limestone, act like sponges, sucking this salty water from the ground. When the water evaporates, the salts are left behind; when this happens at the stone's surface, these crystallize into destructive white lesions...