At least 15 persons died at Pass Christian. The victims included five couples who were having a hurricane party in a three-story apartment. Police Chief Jerry Peralta couldn't make them leave.

"The last time I went up to try to get them out, the water was just over the sea wall. They were having a good time and they wouldn't leave. That's the last anybody saw of them," he said.

[Harry Boon] says that he can always tell what the weather outlook is going to be by watching the gnats and the birds. When the swallows fly low to catch the gnats, it means a heavy atmosphere and that rain is on the way. When the swallows fly high for the gnats, according to Harry, then the sun will shine all day. . .

Birds, insects, and reptiles provide a host of minor prophets, most of them with a gloomy message to proclaim. The noisy quacking of ducks and geese, the croaking of frogs, the loud singing of the missel-thrush, and the crawling of the toad across the road at dusk are one and all harbingers of rain.

The spider is the most interesting barometer. She prepares for wind by shortening the main filaments of her web. When these are unusually long, fine weather may be expected to last for 10 or 12 days. Very rarely is the web left alone for more than 24 hours. Complete cessation of work is said to be a sign of wet, but if activities are resumed during the rain it is an indication that the shower will not last long and will be followed by a spell of settled weather.

Alamaro, in cooperation with German and Russian colleagues, presented his latest idea at a weather conference in Washington earlier this year. The idea is to tow barges equipped with about 20 jet engines into a hurricane's projected path, ignite the engines with the jet pointed skyward and create updrafts and plumes that would suck up some of the heat from the ocean.

After operating for about half a day, the updraft would create a tropical storm of its own. This would cool the water through which the advancing hurricane would move and so rob a potentially deadly storm of some strength. Alamaro said there's more than an ample supply of unused jet engines on the mothballed fleets of Cold War bombers now rusting in desert junkyards in Arizona and Nevada.

Alamaro said a 10 percent reduction in a hurricane's wind speed would result in a 50 percent reduction in its power when the storm hits landfall. If it works the way Alamaro and his colleagues suggest, residents of the Atlantic and Caribbean shores might one day experience more tropical storms, but not so many hurricanes.

"What we want to do is create several tropical storms to replace the hurricane. It would not stop it completely," he said.

According to the popular science writer Louis Figueir, all the excitement about the new knowledge of electricity led to an odd trend: in his recounting, Paris in the 1770s saw a fad for ladies’ lightning-rod caps, trimmed with metallic thread connecting to a cord that dragged along the ground. The (extremely flawed) theory was that the cord would carry a lightning bolt harmlessly away from the wearer. He also writes of a lightning-rod umbrella proposed by one of Ben Franklin’s acolytes, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg. The umbrella would be surmounted with a metal pole and trail a silver braid to bear away the charge.

Suddenly, I was immersed in the brightest light I have ever seen. I moved my head from side to side and all I could see was bright white light, similar in appearance to arc welding light. This next part is strange. I distinctly remember feeling weightless, and that my feet were no longer touching the ground. For some reason, it felt like a number of seconds transpired, even though I realize that lightning strikes are instantaneous. A deafening explosion followed, and I found myself on the ground with the others. Sean was collapsed and huddled on his knees. Smoke was pouring from his back. I rushed over to him and checked his pulse and breathing. He was still alive. I put out the embers on his back and elbows and carried him down the path towards the parking lot, with the rest of the group following.

Later, people told her she'd made it to her friend's yard, tripped, and crawled on her hands and knees to his doorstep. They said she lay there for six straight hours, with her eyes frozen wide open. Hilliard doesn't remember any of that.