Word: oceanic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...upshot is that only 1 in 4 homeowners is covered for a potential catastrophic loss even though most properties are vulnerable. Consider: half of all Americans live within 50 miles of an ocean. The insurance industry recognizes that we are woefully underinsured for flood damage. And the industry has its own list of reasons for why that's so. Banks usually don't require the coverage but probably should. The Federal Government often jumps in with emergency assistance, a disincentive for paying for coverage. And policyholders fail to read the fine print and mistakenly believe they're covered...
Take Ahmed. Ahmed was THE fishman at Supersol, the largest grocery store in West Jerusalem, where I did my shopping almost daily this summer. Despite the fact that Ahmed, an Arab-Israeli resident of the Old City of Jerusalem has never seen the ocean, he loves fish. Every day after we said our hellos, regardless of whether I was even purchasing dairy products, Ahmed insisted on describing the catch of the day, in detail, and the exact way to cook salmon or tuna to perfection...
That number is expected to swell as aging baby boomers finish sending their kids to college and start looking to buy vacation or retirement homes. Explains Orrin Pilkey, professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke University: "Here's a chance to live out life in the place where you had the best time of your life. With people who come to the beach and look for property, it's almost as if they're in heat...
...next century, they say, we may see hurricanes that far exceed Floyd's top sustained winds and approach a hurricane's upper limit of 180 m.p.h.--more than capable of sending a 30-ft. wall of water surging inland, flattening houses, inundating coastal cities and stirring the ocean bottom to a depth...
...strong will those storms be? That's harder to estimate, in part because a very big storm is in some ways its own worst enemy. "A hurricane has a noticeable cooling effect on the ocean," explains atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Indeed, at a certain stage of its life cycle, a storm of a given size will stir up enough cold water to put a halt to its growth. At that point, scientists say, it has come into equilibrium. Maintaining that balance is especially hard, because if a hurricane stirs up too much...