  We construct new examples of manifolds of positive Ricci curvature which,
topologically, are vector bundles over compact manifolds of almost nonnegative
Ricci curvature. In particular, we prove that if E is the total space of a
vector bundle over a compact manifold of nonnegative Ricci curvature, then the
product of E and R^p admits a complete metric of positive Ricci curvature for
all large p.
