Word: opalized
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Another potentially lethal factor: hurricanes can suddenly change in intensity. For Jerry Jarrell, director of the federal Tropical Prediction Center (which includes the National Hurricane Center), the most frightening near miss was not Andrew but Hurricane Opal, which hit the Gulf Coast in October 1995. Opal had been a weak storm, but just before it struck, it underwent what forecasters call "rapid deepening," leaping from Category 2 to nearly Category 5, with winds at 150 m.p.h. It also started moving faster. Such rapid change is the thing emergency managers most fear. Says Tom Millwee, coordinator of the Texas Division...
...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...
...novel, menaced by half-understood threats, never sure what ground is solid. The horror here is peeked at slantwise, through a girl's splayed fingers. What appears to be true is that Oyster bound dozens of young believers into a cult whose elements included an underground life of opal mining, ecstatic prayer and patriarchal sex. And that in the end Oyster gratified his inflamed ego with mass suicide. The author's story, of course, is a rough match with remembered headlines--of Waco, of Heaven's Gate and the rest. But the mad Oyster, dead before the narrative begins...
...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...
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...