Synopses & Reviews
The wind blows in at 175 miles per hour. A tidal wave twenty-five feet tall washes far inland. Across a piece of coastline fifty miles long, all signs of civilization are reduced to rubble and matchwood. This is the work of a Category 5 hurricane the worst kind of storm possible on this earth.
Hurricane Floyd induces a paralysing sense of dread as it approaches. It's a bone-shaking, gut-twisting rollercoaster for the scientists who fly in it; their research plane is thrown about on the wind. But worst of all, the storm brings wretched fear and horror to those who must endure it on the ground. The survivors are left with literally nothing but their lives amid a corpse-strewn wasteland of insanitary swamp and wreckage.
In September 1999, in the biggest evacuation in the history of the United States, 3 million people fled from the path of Hurricane Floyd. From Florida to North Carolina, they took only what they could throw in their cars; some of the roads leading inland were gridlocked for fourteen hours.
President Clinton, returning home early from a summit meeting, declared a string of states to be federal disaster zones. Forecasters and emergency managemnet staff knew all too well what they faced: only eleven months earlier in Honduras, Hurricane Mitch had destroyed an entire nation, killing 9,000 people as it did so.
From apocalyptic devastation in Central America to a frantic race against time in Miami, this is as close to the storm as it's possible to go. Going face to face with nature at its most unimaginably violent, The Devil's Music tells the true story of the hurricane: gripping, frightening and immensely powerful.