Word: ellsworth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...will save from the move. At Maine's Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, thousands of workers shouting "Take us off the list!" have demonstrated before visiting members of a commission reviewing Rumsfeld's recommendation to do away with the facility. Faced with the shuttering of his state's second largest employer, Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota Senator John Thune wants to attach an amendment to this year's defense bill to delay all base closings...
...here's where things get wild. Hoping to reverse the decline, enterprising small towns across the Great Plains have begun offering land at little or no cost to anyone who will build a house and move in. The programs have taken wing in the Kansas towns of Marquette, Ellsworth and Minneapolis. "So far, I like what I see," says Jim Wymore, 40, as he is shown around Ellsworth on a gusty May afternoon. He's in town with his brother Shawn, 39, to check out the land deal. Both are from Chicago, and would be prize catches for any population...
Rural America has been hemorrhaging population for decades, of course, with small towns trying--and failing--to reverse the outflow by wooing a big manufacturer with tax incentives. "That was the whole game--elephant hunting," says Anita Hoffhines, who heads economic development in Ellsworth. The new approach, known as "economic gardening," is to bring in people and let businesses follow. Not big businesses but shops and cafés that employ two or three people and that would slowly re-energize Main Street. It's a bit of a catch-22. With no jobs available, who will move there...
Such failures offer lessons. Free land alone is not enough. Struggling towns need to attract folks who bring incomes with them or will commute to a larger city for work. And the towns are not above a little salesmanship. So Ellsworth, where Wild Bill Hickock once roamed and locals insist they know more about Wyatt Earp than his biographer does, promotes itself as "the wickedest cow town in the West." Prowers County, Colo., appeals to bird watchers with its 400 species. Atwood, Kans., tells hunters about its bountiful wild turkey, pheasant and deer. Six counties in northwestern North Dakota share...
...geophysical sweet spot on the San Andreas that is a miniature earthquake machine. The size of a football field, it rattles with microearthquakes--in this case, earthquakes of magnitude 2--with surprising regularity. Right next door, within a 2-mile radius, are more microquake clusters. In the coming years, Ellsworth anticipates, SAFOD will record fine-grained portraits of thousands of tiny temblors, many not much bigger than magnitude 0. By closely examining those portraits, scientists should be able to tell how closely one event resembles another and whether earthquakes, at least in principle, are predictable...