Natural Disasters

At the dawn of the 20th century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms....

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs....

In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land....

Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids....

Cathie Pelletier's breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature's capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation....

The true story behind the events that inspired the major motion picture Only the Brave. A "unique and bracing" (Booklist) first-person account by the sole survivor of Arizona's disastrous 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which took the lives of 19 "hotshots"....

Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century....

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire....

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded...

A heart-stopping true-life tale of maritime disaster,survival, and daring rescue from a master storyteller....

Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing....

On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in 35 years....

At 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately forty-eight seconds, shock waves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death, and trapped many alive....

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines to provide a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept.

The true story of two doomed ships and a daring search-and-rescue operation that shines a light on the elite Coast Guard swimmers trained for the most dangerous ocean missions....

"Pass the Wildland Firefighter Exam: The Essential Guide to Launching Your Career Fighting Wildfires" is a comprehensive study guide designed to ...

No one likes to think of the worst case scenario, but if you're not prepared, "worst case" could become much worse than you ever imagined....You hope that you’ll never need an emergency plan, but the truth is, it’s only if you have one that you’ll be ready....

In the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Sudden Sea hearkens back to a natural disaster that struck terror in the hearts of many. In this narrative, listeners experience the Great Hurricane of 1938, the most financially destructive storm on record....

In March 1980, a napping volcano awoke. Two months later, the mountain roared. Author Richard Waitt was one of the first to arrive following the mountain's early rumblings. A geologist with intimate knowledge of Mount St. Helens, Waitt delivers a detailed and accurate chronicle of events.

In The Great Deluge, Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart....

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived....

On a Sunday in May 2008, an F5 tornado hit the town of Parkersburg, Iowa, killing eight people and destroying 250 homes and businesses within a span of 34 seconds. The next day, Parkersburg's beloved football coach, Ed Thomas, made a stunning prediction....

Rethinking Readiness offers an expert introduction to human-made threats and vulnerabilities, with a focus on opportunities to reimagine how we approach disaster preparedness....

An elite crew trained to combat the most challenging wildfires, the Granite Mountain Hotshots were a ragtag family crisscrossing the American West and wherever else the fires took them....

Tim Samaras didn’t attend a day of college in his life. He chased storms with brilliant tools of his own invention and pushed closer to the tornado than anyone else ever dared....