Official metrics of Category Five hurricanes—maximum sustained winds of at least 155 miles an hour, barometric pressure below 920 millibars, and a storm surge of eighteen or more feet—don’t quite capture the raw power of the phenomenon. The sheer intensity is hard to convey. Big hurricanes, such as Camille, provide enough energy in a few hours’ time sufficient to supply the United States with a year’s worth of electricity; the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was measured in millitons but the energy from Category Five hurricanes is measured best in thousands of megatons; the winds of a Category...

I begin this chapter by contradicting the first. I begin, also, with a quotation. The quotation is from the Congressional Globe, March 29, 1867. We join Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate as he offers an amendment to a bill providing federal relief for broken levees in Mississippi. Keep in mind the year and context: 1867, in the cauldron of Reconstruction.

I am unwilling that Congress should seem in any way to commit itself to so very great an expenditure in one of these States, except with the distinct understanding that it shall not be...

By any measure, the economic cost of Hurricane Camille was staggering. Over six thousand destitute families were counted in September alone; the hotels, businesses, and homes that once populated the eighty-mile length of the Gulf Coast where Camille slammed ashore “lay flattened.” Two towns in particular, Pass Christian and Long Beach, had been “virtually blown away from the face of the earth.” Early, rough estimates were staggering: over two hundred dead, twelve thousand homes destroyed or very severely damaged, and six hundred businesses gone. About one-third of Mississippi’s economy had vanished.¹

In this chapter, the questions I wish to ask...