Word: rain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...radios, police scanners, video cameras and a gutsy determination to stop kids from shooting one another. Seven men and two women bow their heads around a small table in the one-story, cinder-block command center in a rough part of town, hoping for peace, or at least enough rain to keep kids off the streets for one more night. "The hour is getting late, and our children need us," says John Foster, a vice president of the city employees union, who founded the group four years ago after his son was badly beaten. The prayer is interrupted...
...days of dry weather allowed water levels to recede slowly along parts of the Mississippi River. Des Moines, Iowa, turned its tap water back on for the first time in almost two weeks. But later in the week heavy rain returned to much of the area, causing still more flooding. "We are going to have another crest coming down," said Larry Crump, Army Corps of Engineers spokesman at Kansas City, Missouri. So far, the flood has killed at least 40 people, submerged 16,000 sq. mi. of farmland and caused $10 billion in damage...
Just as the flood seemed to crest, more rain came...
...debate is all the more vexing because it involves trying to outguess Mother Nature -- a futile endeavor, as evidenced by the wild unlikelihood of devastating rain in July, which nonetheless happened. The consistent pattern of late 20th century flooding in the U.S. has been a decline in deaths proportionate to the area inundated, but a startling rise in property damage, due to increased building and farming on the floodplains and inflation in dollar values. Beyond that, all is as uncertain as the exact height of the flood crest and the precise time it will pass St. Louis. A 1955 book...
...another week of hauling sandbags, scrounging for bottled water and fleeing for higher ground in nine Midwestern states as the Mississippi River and its tributaries continued to flood. In Iowa, days of rain sent the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers flowing over their banks, inundating farmland and knocking out Des Moines's main water-purification plant, leaving 250,000 people without running water. President Bill Clinton ended a Hawaiian vacation early to tour affected areas. "I've never seen anything on this scale before," he said. Clinton promised to ask Congress to approve $2.5 billion or more in disaster relief...