Word: opalized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...only damper on the occasion could be the weather. Although any spillover from Hurricane Opal will be gone by the weekend, the National Weather Service predicts a chance of showers tomorrow and partly cloudy skies Sunday, with high temperatures...
...This is as bad as any hurricane can get," S.C. Gwynne reports from Navarre Beach, a barrier island about 20 miles east of Pensacola in the area that bore the full force of Hurricane Opal. "There are chunks of asphalt everywhere, a car 200 yards offshore, huge tower cranes twisted like toys, upside-down semi rigs just lying in the sand. Whole buildings are either destroyed and atomized into chunks no bigger than a yard across. In one case, a house had been taken up and thrown 50 yards into the air." Some residents are now returning to the remains...
Churning sustained winds of 125 mph, Hurricane Opal reached the Florida panhandle just after 6 p.m. EDT east of Pensacola. More than 55,000 frightened people have already crammed onto U.S. 29 and Interstate 10; thousands of others who waited too long to evacuate were trapped in their homes. At least one person, a 76-year-old woman, was killed when a spun-off tornado destroyed her mobile home. Opal is the ninth and by far the strongest hurricane of the season, one of the roughest ever. State officials compared it Hurricane Camille, which killed 256 people in Mississippi, Alabama...