That's a mouthful

This/last year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (aka "worst opening sentence" contest) grand prize winner:

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.