It was a Monday in mid-January of 1995, and as a daily newspaper reporter I had an appointment scheduled for the next day to interview some local activist group. For some reason I can’t remember now, I had been hoping to get out of doing the interview and thought to myself: A big disaster would be about the only way to knock this off my schedule for the day....

No lie; that is just the way it happened. The next morning, almost as if I had jinxed myself (and a whole lot of other people), that “big disaster” came to pass.