Word: alaska
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meanwhile, on an island southwest of Anchorage, the 4,025-ft. Mount ( Augustine volcano erupted for the second time, after being dormant since 1976. University of Alaska Geophysicist David Stone explained that the Mount Augustine eruptions, which shot ash eight miles into the sky, are loosely related to the earthquakes in that both are caused by the same "gross global mechanism": the glacial movement of the Pacific tectonic plate, which is inching north below California and diving under southern Alaska...
...seemed as if the good times would go on forever. As the price of fuel soared through the 1970s, the economies of oil-rich regions, from Texas and Oklahoma to Wyoming and Alaska, exploded. The frantic growth fed on itself: in Tulsa, Houston and Denver, skylines seemed to sprout overnight. The new wealth was intoxicating, making giddy millionaires out of young geologists, and inspiring dentists to become oil barons. Says Texas Historian T.R. Fehrenbach: "Oil was a big hot flash of money...
State and city treasuries are not in much better fiscal shape, since revenues from taxes on energy production are falling dramatically. In Alaska, where oil-related businesses account for about 85% of all economic activity, experts project a $1 billion shortfall in the state's budget by June 1987. The government last week proposed cutting $120 million from operating expenses. Both Texas and Louisiana are facing $1 billion deficits. Says Texas Governor Mark White, in a classic understatement: "We can't take oil for granted anymore...
...still flowing as we talk in the U.S. Senate," intoned Jesse Helms, the staunch North Carolina conservative. "It baffles me that we can even be debating 90-day delays (in the delivery of contra aid) when men striving to be free are being killed." Frank Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, warned that the raid "underscores the dangers that the Nicaraguan conflict could spread throughout Central America...
...trouble started when the jet stream, which usually carries water-laden air from the Gulf of Alaska toward Canada, dipped south toward Hawaii, then headed for the coast with a burden of subtropical moisture. Like a conveyor belt gone haywire, it pitched one storm after another across the beleaguered West. In Northern California, 32,000 people were evacuated, more than 7,000 homes damaged or destroyed, and thousands of acres of farmland flooded, including some of the Napa Valley vineyards...