Word: florida
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fearing the worst, officials ordered some 3 million residents to leave the shoreline in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. The largest such evacuation in the nation's history, it created a media frenzy and massive traffic jams, including a backup on Florida's Interstate 10 that stretched 200 miles. Walt Disney World, near Orlando, failed to open for the first time in its history. At the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, only a skeleton crew of volunteers was left behind to watch over launch pads and hangared space shuttles, each worth a couple of billion dollars...
...last-minute northward jog by Floyd spared Florida a direct hit, and the hurricane that finally came ashore at Cape Fear, in North Carolina, was far less powerful than the Floyd of just a day earlier. Still, the storm, skirting the coast all the way to Massachusetts, dumped punishing rains from Florida to Maine and triggered widespread flooding. It left at least 41 dead; thousands more had to be rescued from roofs and trees where they had been stranded by rising waters. But that was nothing compared with the havoc that authorities had feared. Floyd came on like a lion...
...rush to the beach started years ago. As far back as the 1970s, Florida officials realized that the state's environmentally sensitive barrier islands, which protect the mainland from the force of incoming storms, were becoming overbuilt. But when officials tried to put the brakes on development, they came up against some hard political realities. The fat revenue stream from condo towers, resorts and convention hotels made it very difficult to elect antigrowth politicians. Hurricanes were acknowledged to be a danger. But, says Charles Lee, senior vice president of the Florida Audubon Society, "instead of restrictions, you got engineering standards...
...situation in Florida is duplicated on barrier islands up and down the Atlantic Coast. When it's time to evacuate, it doesn't really matter where on these narrow strips of land you live--you're stuck on the same stretch of highway. Some officials now believe that the coastal states may have to toughen their construction standards even more, forcing builders to install hardened bunkers, like aboveground bomb shelters, so residents can stay during a hurricane and take their chances...
...they do this very efficiently, the same task could be performed by swarms of independent thunderstorms. It takes a certain amount of magic, in other words, to set a hurricane in motion. First, you have to make the thunderstorms, and then "you have to get the thunderstorms dancing," as Florida State University climatologist James O'Brien puts it. "You have to get them dancing in a big circle dance...