Word: waterspouts
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...digging a 500-ft. tunnel under the Confederates key redoubt, blowing it up and running a ground attack through the breach. The tunnel was dug, 320 kegs of powder were planted, and after a misfiring fuse was relit, the earth flew up, as one soldier wrote, like "a waterspout as seen at sea." A gap 500 yards wide opened in the Confederate line. The attackers rushed forward-only to bog, company after company, in the wide crater. The Confederates began lobbing mortar shells, and within a short time, close to one-third of the attackers were wiped...
Chalk & Cornfields. This humane little story is fortified with homely scenes: Uncle Adrian tippling a bit or sinking his hands lovingly into dough, Philip teasing the baker's lovesick apprentice. Novelist Newby has a fine ear for simple speech ("The tongue is the waterspout of the heart," declaims Uncle Adrian, "and if you let it get clogged your heart'll bust"). He writes with poetic affection for the countryside: "It was chalk country. Except where the trees stood in neat clumps upon the hills and where a belt of cornfields crept up among the contours, the turf...
...Royal Oak, water and fire rose even higher. We saw one waterspout after another followed by a series of huge explosions-white, red and green lights in a fireworks display such as I never had seen before. Pieces of deckwork, masts and smokestacks flew up into the air, giving the impression that the entire ship was blown completely to smithereens...
Many an old sailor has never seen a waterspout, but when they appear at all they are usually in groups. As many as 30 have been sighted from a single ship in one day. Twenty or thirty feet is the average diameter, although a few are as thick as 700 ft. Spouts a mile high have been reported. Usually they move with the wind but may travel in other directions at speeds up to 80 m.p.h. Average life of a spout...
...vicious spout swung inland from the bay off Swansea, Wales, struck a hillside, gutted a row of houses, washed 8,000 tons of earth, rock, debris and human beings to the bottom of the slope. Once a waterspout hit a White Star liner headon, doused the crow's nest, slopped tons of water on the decks, wrecked the bridge and chartroom, flooded cabins. Five years ago Bordeaux housewives reaped a harvest of small fish swept up from the River Garonne into a water twister, carried inshore and deposited wriggling in the streets...