Word: coasting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...through 1969 when monster storms swept ashore with greater frequency. Anyone who lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992 might disagree, but the experts say that for the past quarter-century America has got off easy. The last Category 5, or "catastrophic," hurricane was Camille, which struck the Gulf Coast in 1969 with winds over 200 m.p.h. and a storm surge 24 ft. high. Since then, hurricane activity has been mild...
...cases, what boosted those early storms to Top-10 status was population growth. In 1995, for example, Pielke says, the population of two Florida counties alone, Dade and Broward, was greater than the 1930 population of the entire coast from Texas through Virginia. Like compulsive gamblers betting the mortgage, Americans have pressed their luck to the limit. There has been so much development on barrier islands and beaches along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, researchers say, that a hurricane of even modest intensity can cause a multibillion-dollar disaster. In Florida the value of insured coastal property rose from...
Another potentially lethal factor: hurricanes can suddenly change in intensity. For Jerry Jarrell, director of the federal Tropical Prediction Center (which includes the National Hurricane Center), the most frightening near miss was not Andrew but Hurricane Opal, which hit the Gulf Coast in October 1995. Opal had been a weak storm, but just before it struck, it underwent what forecasters call "rapid deepening," leaping from Category 2 to nearly Category 5, with winds at 150 m.p.h. It also started moving faster. Such rapid change is the thing emergency managers most fear. Says Tom Millwee, coordinator of the Texas Division...
MIAMI: Nearly a year ago, the Coast Guard pulled over a boat filled with Cuban expatriates headed to Venezuela, where Fidel Castro was soon to visit. Their mission: To assassinate El Jefe, according to law enforcement officials. Thirty years ago, the suspects would probably have been on the CIA's payroll -- or could at least have counted on the U.S. to look the other way. But on Tuesday, the seven men -- including a prominent member of the Cuban American National Foundation, a once-powerful anti-Castro lobby -- were indicted. They face life imprisonment. For Castro's enemies, the times certainly...
...same time, the cat's population has increased, in California alone reaching an estimated 5,000, double the number in 1972. The population, once threatened by bounty hunters, is protected on the West Coast by state laws that ban the sport hunting of cougars or forbid the use of dogs to do so. And just as cougars began proliferating again, they were presented with alternative prey, such as pets and domesticated animals brought in by the growing human settlements...