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A paragraph in a Reuters article:

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter that “human error at time of crisis caused by U.S. adventurism led to disaster,” citing an initial armed forces investigation into the crash of the Boeing 737-800.

My question is why it is not 'at the time of crisis' and not 'led to the disaster' since 'time' and 'disaster' here refer to a specific period and an incident respectively.

Thanks!

More about the word 'disaster'. Following is a sentence in Oxford Dictionary:

Disaster struck when the wheel came off.

This sentence appears in the second entry of the word in the dictionary, in which it is classified as both countable and uncountable noun. It will appear that the 'disaster' in the sentence is uncountable. But why? Because I will understand that the 'disaster' here means a very bad situation, hence countable?

Rrr
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  • I was surprised how often this locution appears in print, but overwhelmingly (40:1, at least) "at a time of crisis" or "at times of crisis" are preferred. Bear in mind that this is a tweet and it's from a tweeter who's probably not a native speaker, although he may well be fluent. – user105719 Jan 11 '20 at 10:02
  • @user105719 I did consider the 'non-native speaker' and 'tweeting' aspects. However, from what I understand, when a journalist quotes a speech and they think it is not grammatical they will normally make some changes, e.g. filling missing words with square brackets and there are no apparent changes. – Rrr Jan 11 '20 at 10:18

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