By John Travis
The transformation was stunning: One moment a nondescript tropical storm, the next, a hurricane of an intensity no American alive had ever experienced. The storm did not grow through some gradual accretion of power; it exploded forth like something escaping from a cage. The Weather Bureau of 1900 had a code word for winds of 150 miles an hour—extreme—but no one in the bureau seriously expected to use it.
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Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm
(1999, Crown)