Word: grounded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even more ominous for those on the ground, however, was its demonic persistence. The average tornado logs mere minutes on the ground. The Chickasha twister settled in like a plow, ripping an 80-mile gash northeast through a corner of Oklahoma City and several suburbs over an endless four hours. Thousands of Oklahomans heard the shriek of the warning sirens gradually overwhelmed by a sound variously described as like a locomotive, or a screaming jet engine, or nothing on Earth. The worst fear, said Moore resident Delee MacAlister, "is the terror of knowing you are going to die. We prayed...
...conjured up the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Much of their state was in textbook chaos: trees in living rooms, roofs blown off, crumpled cars in fields where cows should have been and dead livestock festooning parking lots. But at the big storm's extensive ground zero, the landscape was closer to lunar. Returnees sometimes had trouble locating not just their homes but their neighborhood. In Mulhall, a hamlet north of Oklahoma City, the only store was flattened, the water tower torn down, and every one of the 200 homes damaged...
...City, Monica Hicks wandered the vacant lot that had been her home and remarked, "I knew it would be bad, but I didn't prepare myself for this. My three-year-old said, 'Mommy, the tornado ate our house.'" Hicks spotted a pink plastic Cadillac on the ground with a doll at the wheel and broke into a loopy, exhausted grin. "Barbie wore her seat belt," she said...
...pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground..." On this fine recitation goes, by sheer loopy eloquence getting a couple of beat-up bull riders from rodeo to rodeo in their falling-apart pickup, ending with, "...turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep...
...begins, "In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns...