Word: gilberte
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...Gilbert blew Mike and George off the front pages, as its record dimensions and ominous approach dominated news reports. Overnight, specialists like Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, became trusted gurus, interpreting the big blow with computers. Somehow the storm seemed the violent culmination of a season in which Mother Nature has done anything but nurture, producing the hottest American summer in 50 years, a drought that parched the Midwest, forest fires that turned U.S. parks into cinders, floods that submerged large parts of Bangladesh and Sudan...
Only in its final landfall did Gilbert reveal a benign side. The hurricane hit a relatively unpopulated area of Mexico, 110 miles southwest of Brownsville, Texas, where the terrain of mountains and flat farmland helped undermine its strength. It did bring more than 6 in. of rain, causing flooding in an area the size of Colorado. At week's end it had spun off some 30 tornadoes twisting around coastal Texas. High winds and battering rain were expected as far north as Chicago. Gilbert, according to Mark Zimmer of the National Hurricane Center, will turn into a "huge rainmaking machine...
Born as a low-pressure trough off the coast of Africa, fed by a combination of heat, moisture and atmospheric instability, Gilbert grew in size and force as it moved westward across the Atlantic. On Saturday, Sept. 10, about 225 miles southeast of the Dominican Republic, it was officially designated a hurricane when its winds exceeded the required 74 m.p.h. It sideswiped Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti on Sunday before reaching a raging fury over Jamaica on Monday. In Kingston the sky darkened and turned slate blue, as winds tore into the unprotected tropical island. Streets became rivers...
Afterward Gilbert nearly doubled in force, making it, like Camille in 1969, a rare Category 5 hurricane, as it smashed into the Yucatan at dawn on Wednesday. In the flashy resort city of Cancun, authorities evacuated several thousand people, mostly vacationers. But the poor had no place to go. Winds leveled their often flimsy dwellings, and flood tides washed them away. Some 30,000 were left homeless in Yucatan state and about 10,000 more in Campeche on the peninsula's west coast...
...Gilbert's freakiest turns came when its winds caught up a 300-ft.- long Cuban freighter five miles out in the Gulf. Mountainous waves heaved the ship all the way onto the shore at Cancun beach, where it smashed into a structure and came to rest on the sand...