Word: opalized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...location, scrawled months ago on a postcard as a possible next stop. With cruelly bad luck they might find the place. The author describes an outpost of paranoia and fear festering with something more virulent than countrymen's traditional loathing for outsiders and government bureaucrats. Rumored large discoveries of opals in the surrounding geologic strata don't really explain matters because opal mining has scuffled along here for decades. Except for tankerloads of beer and gasoline, contact with the rest of Australia is largely cut off. Mail to the outside is stamped, sorted and bagged, but not sent...
...Nothing gets a network newsman's juices flowing like a good hurricane, with its made-to-order suspense ("the eye of the storm is expected to hit land at 9 p.m....") and the opportunity for daredevil theatrics (Dan Rather clinging to a pole in Panama City, Florida, as Hurricane Opal hits). Local weathercasters in the nervous Northeast treat every approaching snowstorm as if it were the coming Armageddon...
...this is no consolation to the families of the 18 dead, the thousands of people left homeless and the hundreds of thousands whose vacations and property were disrupted--if not ruined--by Hurricane Opal, which roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and ripped through the Southern U.S. last week. The storm grew with surprising speed from a mild tropical depression to the most powerful hurricane of the season that was one of the worst stretches of hurricane formation on record. If Opal had struck a few hours earlier, or hit New Orleans, or Mobile, Alabama, or another big coastal...
...Even so, Opal left its gruesome mark. It was a dangerously quirky hurricane, tearing murderously into some areas while leaving nearby land relatively untouched. Property losses were estimated at $2 billion, making it the fourth most costly natural disaster in U.S. history. Opal utterly demolished much of a 140-mile stretch of coastline between Mobile and Panama City, Florida, including some of America's most exquisite beaches. It killed people with falling trees in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina. But no major population areas caught the full force of its winds, and some towns directly in its path managed...
More than 100,000 people fled inland to avoid Opal, although many waited too long. Lorraine Brown, a bartender and 22-year resident of Pensacola Beach, had intended to stay close by. When she was finally persuaded to leave, she found herself trapped in the massive gridlock that formed along woefully inadequate evacuation routes. "I sat in traffic for hours and then gave up," says Brown. She finally drove off the highway and rode out the storm, stuck with her dog in a parking lot. Many who did get off the narrow barrier islands drove for hours--some...