Word: alicia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Alicia, however, was not yet spent. By Thursday morning the storm had rolled 45 miles inland to Houston. Over the past ten years, the city's skyline has been transformed by glass-sheathed showpieces, like the S-shaped Allied Bank building. With rapid-fire pops, wind and flying debris punched out scores of windows in these architectural landmarks. "I stood upstairs in my office this morning and watched large sheets of plate glass coming down from 30 stories high," said Civil Defense Administrator Jonell Toole...
...Hyatt Regency Hotel proved particularly vulnerable. A twister, one of a score that gusted up during Alicia's onslaught, blew open the cavernous 30-story atrium, allowing water and wind to swirl inside. The hotel and its seven restaurants were brimming with 1,000 guests, many of them refugees from the hurricane. As some 80 windows shattered, guests were moved into the ballroom, where the hotel provided blankets and baskets of free food. Some 20,000 other evacuees were given sanctuary in 83 Red Cross shelters in the area...
...always, there were uplifting vignettes. As Alicia bore down on Houston during the predawn hours of Thursday, Surgeon Denton Cooley, who had finally been able to find a suitable heart donor for a 48-year-old patient, performed a successful transplant. At St. Mary's Hospital in Galveston, the wife of a Coast Guard yeoman seaman gave birth to a baby girl. She was named (what else?) Alicia...
...faith that no weather is truly inexplicable, said that the drought in the Midwest has been caused by a particularly stubborn high-pressure system stuck over the center of the country. The system has been pulling rain-bearing winds from the Gulf of Mexico to Southern California and Nevada. Alicia was caused by a cooler front slanting down from Canada along the East Coast. As its leading edge crashed into the hot air over the gulf, a storm was born that soon grew into a hurricane...
Having poked the eyes of Texas, the destructive Alicia now has a chance to do a good turn or two. Not only is she bringing rain to the dry fields of the Midwest, she is also edging the brutish high-pressure system eastward. That could cause a lot of raised temperatures this week on the East Coast, but it might salvage some of the harvest in the Midwest and allow Southern California and Nevada to dry out. For a nation coping with a most cantankerous and confounding summer, such a shift would be welcome indeed...