Word: chena
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Captain E. T. Barnette pushed a cargo-laden stern-wheeler ten miles up central Alaska's Chena River, halted when the waters became too shallow, and established a trading post from which, with the gold rush one year later, sprang the city of Fairbanks. Barnette should have settled on higher ground...
Last week, after a five-day rainfall that saturated the so-called "Golden Heart of Alaska" with more than six inches of rain, the 200-ft.-wide Chena spilled disastrously over its banks and deluged Fairbanks. Floodwaters swirled through the state's second largest city at depths up to 9 ft., inundating cars, lapping at second-story windows, crumbling foundations. Before the rains abated toward week's end, some 15,000 of Fairbanks' 30,000 residents were homeless. At least seven, including two in the flooded village of Tok 200 miles to the southeast, were dead...
Roiling Killer. Nearly every summer the Chena, which snakes through Fairbanks running south to join the Tanana, leaps toward flood stage as winter snows melt in the mountains. But this time, fed by the abnormally heavy rain fall, which in turn washed down summer snow from the mountains, the Chena became a roiling killer...
Over hundreds of square miles, central Alaska looked from the air like a gigantic paddy field. The Chena, whose flood level is pegged at 12.1 ft., on the fifth day of rain crested at 18.8 ft. at Fairbanks. The downtown shopping district was deluged. By Mayor H. A. ("Red") Boucher's count, 75% of the city's businesses took major damage. Virtually every building in the city was awash. Volunteers sandbagged St. Joseph's Hospital until patients could be evacuated. The Alaska-67 exposition, celebrating the centennial of the territory's purchase, was severely damaged...
...Only the Strong." The gaudy history of Alaska's territorial period is reconstructed in miniature at the Fair banks fair. Visitors (300,000 anticipated) can either tour a gold-painted geodesic dome meant to symbolize a nugget, or else pan gold themselves, sourdough-fashion, in chutes from the Chena River; sip cocktails in the "Wheelhouse," a VIP lounge on the superstructure of the old Alaskan stern-wheeler Nenana; view an aboriginal village with Eskimo kayak rides and a Tlingit totem-pole carver at work; or ogle the cancan dancers from an authentic gold-rush...