Word: beulah
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...competence varies greatly from state to state and even from unit to unit. Some Guard units this summer performed more than creditably in the troublesome task of quelling rioters, and 1,300 Texas Guardsmen worked night and day last week in protecting the populace against the ravages of Hurricane Beulah. Yet its overall performance in Newark and Detroit poses timely questions about its fundamental purpose that no amount of speechmaking can hide...
...blow of 1900 took 7,000 lives; a "killer hurricane" that struck Florida and the West Indies in 1928 left 4,000 dead in its wake. In India, where the whirling warm-water storms are called "cyclones," 11,000 Bengalis perished in a 1942 assault. Last week, as Hurricane Beulah-the third most powerful blow ever to hit Texas-slammed into the populous Rio Grande Valley and coursed its crushing way inland, only ten deaths were reported-one of them a 15-year-old girl surfer swept from her board while braving Beulah's mountainous waves...
...death toll was largely attributable to the technology of mid-century America. Thanks to a covey of "Hurricane Hunter" aircraft and a hat-box-shaped, 320-lb. weather satellite called Essa (for the Commerce Department's Environmental Science Services Administration), Beulah's every move was tracked and reported round the clock by radio, thus permitting more than 150,000 Texans to dodge the big storm's flailing fist. Watching from a polar orbit 865 miles above the earth, Essa's twin TV cameras gave the Texas Gulf Coast twelve days' advance warning on her course...
Angry Hornets. Beulah's freshest fury was expended on the dun-colored delta of the Rio Grande and the tiny ports that dot the Gulf Coast. Port Isabel (pop. 4,000), a shrimp-fishing village, was smashed by 150 m.p.h. winds; only a lighthouse and a newly built brick bank were left undamaged, along with Captain G. D. Kennedy, who with his wife and his handmade 60-ft. shrimp boat rode out the storm with diesel engines and good seamanship...
...Beulah's eye, packing the power of 150 hydrogen bombs in its screaming winds, passed just offshore of Brownsville (pop. 53,000), piling scores of shrimpers, each costing from $35,000 to $50,000, into hull-shattered heaps of as many as 25 boats each. Gusts up to 109 m.p.h. threw horizontal sheets of rain so fast that, to one observer, they sounded "like a million angry hornets." Plywood shutters, hammered hastily into place on the shop windows of Brownsville's main drag, were shucked off like orange skins; power lines cracked with bullwhip viciousness...