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Nature 411, 874 (21 June 2001) | doi:10.1038/35082202

Texas facilities count cost of tropical storm

Rex Dalton

A week after a tropical storm flooded research facilities in Houston, Texas, many scientists were still locked out of their labs, assessing a disaster that has wiped out years of studies on a variety of diseases.More than 30,000 research animals — mostly mice and rats — were destroyed, an untold number of reagents obliterated and many investigations wrecked by the record rainfall from tropical storm Allison, which swept in off the Gulf of Mexico in the early morning of 9 June.