Hurricane hunters fly an airplane into the calm eye of a storm in August 1969, as Hurricane Camille lingers for two days over the Gulf of Mexico, gathering strength before swerving away from Florida, where it is expected to land, and slamming into the Mississippi coast instead. With winds over 200 miles per hour, Camille is the biggest hurricane to hit the United States in one hundred years. Levees crumble, towns are washed away by a thirty-foot-high tidal wave, and Biloxi, Mississippi, is inundated. Four hundred people die, including five couples who stay to have a “hurricane party” in their Pass Christian, Mississippi, apartment building, and 400,000 others are left homeless. Damages exceed $1 billion. A woman cries when she returns and sees what is left of her neighborhood. In another time and place, a hot-air balloon carries three men into the stratosphere and back. For a time, the dirigible, an airship kept aloft by helium or hydrogen, was thought to be a replacement for ocean liners, but the dirigible has drawbacks. Men on the ground have to land them with ropes, and during a landing of the U.S. Navy airship Akron, a gust of wind pushes it back into the air so quickly that three of the men do not let go of their ropes in time, and two workers drop to their deaths. A former acrobat named Joseph Spah discusses how he escaped from the LZ 129 Hindenburg. A storm is brewing as it arrives in Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Frankfurt, Germany, on 6 May 1937. Herb Morrison, a radio announcer for WLS in Chicago, broadcasts live from the airfield as the giant airship prepares to land. Mooring ropes are dropped to men below, but as the Hindenburg approaches the ground, it explodes. Because of a U.S. boycott against selling helium to Nazi Germany, the Hindenburg uses flammable hydrogen, and perhaps lightning has set it off. Many are killed, and Morrison barely contains his horror. In 1971, Mt. Etna on the Italian island of Sicily comes alive. Geologist Harun Tazief and other volcano experts venture near the volcano crater in fireproof suits to measure temperatures and seismic activity. Lava boils up, explodes, and pours down the mountainside in bright orange rivers that destroy everything below, including a village and local fields. Tourists arrive to watch the lava move at a speed of one-quarter mile a day. In all, it rolls for sixty-nine days, leaving nothing behind, but nobody is killed. In America, an Oklahoma farmer says, “Back in 1927 I had a little farm and I called it heaven.” People worked hard and lived well, but they over-grazed and over-planted the land, and when the Depression came, it brought not only poverty but four years of drought that turned the soil to dust and Oklahoma into the “Dust Bowl.” Banks foreclosed on homes and farmers became migrants. One day, “There came the blackest dust storm that ever filled the sky,” Woody Guthrie sings. When the rains return, the remaining farmers reclaim the land by planting trees to break the wind. At the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Speedway in Indiana, race cars filled with hi-test fuel are like hurtling bombs. In 1973, the race is particularly “crash-plagued” when STP, an oil treatment company that sponsors race cars, enters three red Eagle Offenhauser 40 racers. One of the drivers, David “Swede” Savage, who hits 197 miles-per-hour at one point, is fatally injured in a crash that disintegrates his car. After a rain delay, racing resumes, but there is a mix-up in the lineup, and another crash sends a line of burning fuel down the track. Gordon Johncock, one of the STP drivers, eventually wins, but the final tally is three men dead and one injured. One of the most destructive modern-day tornadoes occured in Xenia, Ohio, on 3 April 1974. Television cameras capture the storm’s arrival as a dark funnel drops out of the clouds and spins along the ground, ripping a wide swath through town with winds reaching 500 miles an hour. One man says he heard nails popping out of his walls and, then, the noise of a giant freight train accompanied by darkness. In Xenia, thirty-three people die, 1,000 are injured, 2,000 homes are destroyed, and debris is later found 200 miles north. On the night of 25 Jul 1956, less than a day before its scheduled arrival in New York City, the Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria, the most luxurious passenger ship on the Transatlantic run, enters a fog bank and is struck in the side by the Swedish liner MS Stockholm forty-five miles southeast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. Both ships saw each other on their radars, but both made wrong course changes. The Andrea Doria rolls on its side and sinks after several hours, but the swift arrival of other ships saves all but forty-six of its 1,706 passengers and crew. Television reporter John Coleman hovers above the wounded ship in a helicopter. Hollywood actress Ruth Roman is one of the survivors. Families and friends greet survivors in New York, and Captain Piero Calamai praises his crewmen to reporters. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, Olivia de Majo, a Crefisul Bank employee, gets out of bed on 1 Feb 1974 and drives to work at the twenty-five-story Joelma Building, one of the city's new skyscrapers. Soon after she arrives, an air-conditioning unit on the twelfth floor overheats and creates a fire that spreads through the building's flammable insulation. There are no fire stairs or sprinklers, Sao Paulo has too few fire stations, and the firetrucks' ladders do not reach higher than a few stories. Helicopters lower rescuers to the balconies, and one fireman leads eighteen survivors by rope to another building, but little else can be done. Many people jump or fall to their deaths, and the toll reaches 220 killed, but Olivia survives. Catastrophes, both manmade and natural, are a part of civilization, and as the world population continues to push people into smaller areas with fewer resources, many more tragedies are expected.