Word: makeshift
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That does not stop people from trying. The growing damage to oceanfront property has generated a host of makeshift solutions to erosion. On Galveston Bay, desperate ranchers have positioned junked cars on the shore to prevent the waters from washing away roads. Conservation officers are planting dense patches of cordgrass just offshore in an effort to buffer the bay's clay banks from the relentlessly lapping waters. To protect the transplants until they take hold, conservationists have jury-rigged a protective barrier of old Air Force parachutes in the water to absorb and attenuate the force of the waves. Harry...
...variant on the seawall that can also hasten erosion is riprap -- rocks and boulders piled into makeshift barriers to absorb the force of incoming waves. While seawalls and riprap run parallel to the beach, groin fields extend directly out into the water. Made up of short piers of stone extending from the beach and spaced 100 yds. or so apart, they can slow erosion by trapping sand carried by crosscurrents. But down current, the lack of drifting sand can result in worse erosion. "It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul," says Leatherman -- a concept the O'Malleys of Westhampton...
...bizarre to meet strict operating standards imposed on the Texas system in 1980 by Federal Judge William Wayne Justice. Nonetheless, entrepreneurs keep trying. Hard times in the oil patch have spurred hucksters to offer up abandoned office buildings, foreclosed motels and warehouses to the corrections department as makeshift pens. A few down- and-out Houstonians are even trying to foist off their homes as mini- detention centers...
...have lost up to 30% of their customers to restaurants in nearby towns that permit them to puff away at will. But there was a loophole in the smoke ring: bars and cocktail lounges were exempt from the law. Soon many of Beverly Hills' toniest dining spots were sporting makeshift signs proclaiming that they too were "bars." Customers who objected to the flouting of the law, which mandates a $500 fine for violations, were politely invited to call the cops themselves -- from a telephone outside the restaurant, ah, cocktail lounge...
...committees. As millions of Americans watched on television, North pleaded passionately for support of efforts to overthrow Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista junta. He was even permitted to deliver his patented fund-raising pitch, minus the projection of 57 slides that usually accompany the spiel. Holding a photograph of a makeshift contra grave, North, his voice choking, told the legislators, "Gentlemen, we've got to offer them something more than the chance to die for their own country and the freedoms that we believe...