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NARRATOR: It can cut a giant path of destruction

hundreds of kilometres wide.

A hurricane is this nuclear-like power

that can change your country.

MAN: It was just total destruction.

I felt like I was going to get sucked right out of here.

Devastating winds, relentless storm surges...

...and heavy rains that trigger deadly floods.

No other force of nature

can equal the raw power of a hurricane.

(THEME MUSIC)

Summer on the Texas coast.

As the hot sun sets over the warm waters of the Gulf Of Mexico,

all seems peaceful.

But over the horizon,

a violent force of nature is building

and it's coming this way.

WOMAN: For the third straight day, an unstoppable Hurricane Ike

barrelled through the Caribbean.

A storm so powerful,

it destroyed or damaged 85% of the buildings on the Turks and Caicos.

Spanning 800km,

Hurricane Ike is a monster.

WOMAN: Hurricane Ike is causing severe damage in Cuba

and is headed towards the crowded capital of Havana.

The mammoth hurricane pounded the island of Cuba

with 190km/h winds,

then it veered north towards Texas.

Officials alone the Texas coast are urging residents

to stock up on supplies and prepare to evacuate.

On September the 13th 2008,

Ike smashed into the Texas coast.

Within just four hours,

the hurricane had turned great stretched of lush, green coastline

into a wasteland.

10,000 houses destroyed.

Four million people left without power.

The storm ploughed 80km inland and struck the city of Houston.

Skyscrapers lost windows,

50% of the city's apartment buildings were damaged.

Although the winds themselves were destructive,

they brought something with them that was far more devastating.

As the storm pushed across the Gulf Of Mexico,

it drove a huge wall of sea water towards the shoreline.

As it hit the coast,

the water forced its way up and over the land

in a phenomenon called a storm surge.

I realised we were in trouble when I looked out the kitchen window

and the whole gulf was moving up

just as fast as my hand is moving in.

It came up really rapidly

and before you knew it, it was chest deep.

It was, to me, the surge was rising, rising, rising

and it bubbled up like you were bubbling in a pot.

The water bubbled up from every hole in the ground.

One resident who got trapped in the rising storm surge was Mike Anderson.

At 11 o'clock that night, the water had come up 14ft

and then a foot in the house, so you know it was 15ft deep.

Mike had taken shelter in a neighbour's raised beach house.

But as the full fury of Ike struck,

the combination of storm surge and high winds

began to rip the building apart.

I just started praying, praying as hard as I could.

I was asking God to help me, that I think this is it, you know.

First, the windows started shattering in.

Then the water come in.

Next thing you know, I'm panicking.

I went into each room, 'What am I gonna do?' looking at the windows.

I grabbed a couch, threw it in the window

to keep the wind and water out. Another one blew in.

And then, next thing you know, the door come in.

It just came in like a shot.

Once the hurricane broke in, nothing could stop it.

The next thing you know, you hear this crackling.

You can't describe it. It's something you hear in the movies.

I didn't even think, I didn't hesitate, I just dove out.

As Mike jumped into the water,

the whole beach house collapsed behind him.

Mike was now at the mercy of the raging surge,

fighting for his life.

The force of the surge is so much, there's nothing you can do.

There was three times where I went under

and I didn't think I was going to come back up.

I just kept dog paddling just as much as I could.

I was telling God to help me,

but I kept screaming 'No!' as loud as I could.

'No! No! I'm not gonna die!'

In the heart of the storm, Mike somehow kept himself afloat.

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By the time Hurricane Ike finally eased up,

the storm surge had carried Mike Anderson 12 miles down the coast.

All told, the hurricane claimed the lives of 103 people.

Mike's survival was a miracle.

A storm surge is especially destructive

because water weighs 800 times more than air.

When it strikes, it packs a heavy punch.

To find out exactly how storm surges pull towns apart,

meteorologist Ivor van Heerden has come to Texas.

He's here to do a forensic analysis

of the ruins Hurricane Ike left behind.

The debris field that I'm standing in

is very, very typical of a hurricane.

Especially if there was a surge event,

you get an accumulation of everything,

from boats to houses to businesses.

It's a real jumble - imagine a washing machine

and you threw everything in there and then spread it out.

This is very, very typical.

For 64km, the coast is littered with the contents of people's lives.

Storm surges along this part of the Texas coast

are especially destructive.

From the air, it's easy to see why.

The landscape is completely flat.

Even a small rise in sea level will trigger massive floods.

If we'd been here during hurricane, we wouldn't have seen any land.

This would have been just a very seething mass of water

moving across the island from the Gulf Of Mexico

into the bay.

When the surge hit,

it tore buildings right off their foundations.

So now you have a situation with 16ft of water

moving through the houses and then the pounding of these waves,

9ft high, every six or seven seconds.

And then on top of that,

there would have been debris everywhere,

just debris just moving around.

And the debris itself becomes a battering ram

such that it destroys buildings and structures in its wake.

It was this churning mix of fast-moving water,

heavy debris and wind that destroyed towns all along this coast.

By the time it was over,

Hurricane Ike had caused $31.5 billion worth of damage,

making it the third most expensive hurricane in US history.

Storms like these may be deadly, but they don't start that way.

So how does a gentle breeze become a killer?

Every year, an average of 45 hurricanes

will form around the globe.

But depending on where in the world they form,

these giant storms are known by different names.

Over the Western Pacific, they're called typhoons.

Typhoons often make landfall in Asian countries,

like China and Japan, pounding exposed coastlines.

Storms that form further west over the Indian Ocean

are known as cyclones.

It's the storms that form over the Atlantic

and make landfall in North America that are called hurricanes.

The energy unleashed in a single one of these

can be enough to power the United States for a whole year.

The force of these storms is rated using the Saffir-Simpson Scale.

It ranges from a category one up to a giant category five.

Meteorologist Ivor van Heerden uses a wind tunnel

to demonstrate the different wind categories.

First a category one - 119km/h to 153km/h.

I can feel it blowing past my ears.

It feels like it's almost trying to suck the air out of my ears.

Very, very powerful wind

and this is only a category one hurricane.

A category two - 154km/h to 177km/h.

We're now at 95mph wind.

There's absolutely no way that you could walk in this wind.

It really gives you a feel

for how powerful these hurricanes are.

A category three.

Next up, a category four.

The winds reach between 210km/h to 249km/h.

But the most powerful hurricanes are category fives.

In excess of 250km/h.

If you imagine the energy that's in one atomic bomb,

a major hurricane such as Hurricane Katrina, for example,

as it crossed the Gulf Of Mexico,

expended the energy of over 150,000 atomic bombs.

But how does nature generate such massive forces?

The answer lies here in the Cape Verde Islands,

an isolated island chain in the heart of the Atlantic

nearly 500km off the coast of Africa.

Every year, the warm, humid atmosphere above these islands

sets the stage for one of nature's greatest acts of creation.

It's in these skies

that almost all hurricanes are born.

A few hundred miles over the horizon

lies Africa and the Sahara Desert,

the generator of very hot, dry winds.

Those sort of winds then meet the moist air of the North Atlantic,

giving us the two ingredients for the birth of hurricanes.

About once every three days, a pocket of super heated Saharan air

breaks away from Africa and drifts over the Atlantic.

These warm air pockets are called tropical waves.

This hot air generates giant convection currents

that drive moisture from the surface of the ocean

high into the atmosphere.

As this moisture-laden air cools,

it begins to condense into bands of cloud.

This is the beginning of a hurricane.

We're witnessing the passage of a tropical wave

that started off the coast of Africa, migrating past us,

on its way to the Gulf Of Mexico.

And you're seeing here this very moisture-laden air rising.

This is very typical of what happens

in the convective cells inside these tropical waves.

If the ocean is warm enough,

a tropical wave can begin to feed off the heat rising from the sea.

This then marches across the North Atlantic

gaining energy from the very, very warm ocean waters

and, ultimately, striking the United States.

When the amount of moisture forced into the atmosphere

reaches a critical mass,

the spin of the Earth starts to affect the gathering clouds.

Called the Coriolis effect, this causes the clouds

to merge and create the unmistakable rotating structure of a hurricane.

Once formed, nothing can stop these giant storms.

And when they hit land, their effects can be devastating.

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When most people think of a hurricane,

they think of one thing - wind.

But wind speeds in different parts

of a hurricane's rotating structure vary

from almost tranquil to terrifying.

In the centre of the storm is the eye.

Here everything is eerily calm.

But just outside the eye, it is different.

This is the eye wall,

the most intense part of any hurricane.

Winds here reach up to 320km/h.

It's the violent winds in this part of a hurricane

that can rip even sturdy structures apart in seconds.

In 2004, the sleepy coastal town of Punta Gorda, Florida

was directly in the path of what was forecast

to be a moderate category two storm -

Hurricane Charley.

Veteran storm chaser Jim Edds travelled to Punta Gorda

to film Hurricane Charley as it made landfall.

But as Charley approached, Jim was in for a nasty surprise.

Hurricane Charley was a small hurricane.

You know, the eye wasn't very big. It was about 5 miles across.

One thing about small hurricanes is they can intensify very quickly.

They spin up fast and they can also spin down very fast.

Unfortunately, this one spun up real fast.

Can you hear it? Yeah. It's coming.

Just 32km offshore, Charley suddenly intensified

from a category two to a category four storm.

I was scared, but I'd never been in a category four,

so I didn't really know what was coming.

I had an idea it was gonna be windy,

but you can't imagine a category four.

That's a strong hurricane. You have to see it to believe it.

While Jim Edds was filming the growing power of the storm,

on the other side of town,

resident Brenda Ryan was about to find out

just how quickly a category four hurricane

can rip a house apart.

I looked out my window and my shed just went flying right by me.

And that's when we lost power and things went downhill from there.

When the window broke here in the front, the big window,

I remember all of the pictures blowing around.

The wind, it was like a little cyclone inside that living room.

Nearby, Jim was still out in the open,

filming the violent winds now blasting through the town.

Debris was howling, it was blowing, stuff was being ripped up.

Across the street, we had a sign that blew out.

And I was pretty scared,

cos it was just getting stronger and stronger.

With the eye wall fast approaching,

the hurricane entered its most destructive phase.

It sounded like little bombs going off.

Those were the concrete tiles that were pounding into the house.

Brenda sheltered from the storm in her bathroom.

The ceiling's moving up and down a couple of three inches.

The nails were popped out and just hanging.

The tiles fell off the bottom part of the walls

where the walls were moving in and out.

I think reality had come to me

that I may not walk out of that bathroom.

As the eye wall hit Punta Gorda, winds exceeded 240km/h.

MAN: Here it comes!

Oh, my God! Where...?

But things were about to get even worse.

Winds inside a hurricane are circular,

so as Charley crossed the town, the wind direction began to change.

The safe spot Jim Edds had been filming from

was rapidly becoming a death trap.

Initial the wind's coming over the building,

I felt pretty safe. That's out of the north-east.

As the hurricane got closer,

the wind shifted, came down Highway 41.

The problem with that is debris was really close to me.

I had to back up all the way to this corner.

I was essentially trapped here.

It was howling, debris was just 6ft away from me.

I felt like I was going to get sucked right out of here,

Debris was hitting things, it was busting up.

I saw things cartwheeling down the road

and they'd hit poles and then they'd shatter

and I'm thinking, 'Wow, that's pretty strong.'

You look at a roof blowing down the street,

a roof blowing off a building -

well, sure it could pick me up and send me flying down the street too.

In just one hour, the storm had dismantled Punta Gorda,

leaving the town in ruins.

It was just a debris grinder.

Everything got ripped up.

It was incredible to see this town after that hurricane.

It just looked like a bomb had gone off. Nothing looked normal.

There was nothing standing.

I mean, it just looked like a war zone through here.

Hurricane Charley is a reminder

of just how destructive winds inside these storms can be.

But winds aren't the most lethal part of a hurricane.

That status is reserved for the storm surge.

The reality is nine out of ten hurricane deaths are due to drowning.

As a hurricane moves across the ocean,

powerful winds blast the surface of the sea.

This creates a huge bulge of water that's pushed ahead of the storm.

When this water reaches land,

it's forced up and over the shoreline.

This is a storm surge.

In the last decade, the US has been hit

by 60 different hurricane storm surges.

But one was so powerful it dwarfed all the others.

August 2005.

Hurricane Katrina arrived on the Gulf Coast...

...bringing with it 225km/h winds and a storm surge 6m high.

New Orleans was hit hard.

Almost 2,000 people lost their lives.

This incredible damage happened even though the city

was only brushed by the outer bands of the hurricane.

Katrina actually made landfall 120km away in another state.

The town that took the full brunt of the storm was Gulfport, Mississippi.

Hurricane Katrina was so violent that it actually changed the...

Storm chasers Jim Reed and Mike Theiss were there when it happened.

Hurricane Katrina was by far

the highest storm surge I had ever witnessed

and probably the most I will see in my lifetime.

This storm surge was so powerful and destructive

that it actually obliterated the entire coastline

of one of America's states.

Mike and Jim had picked a sturdy concrete hotel

right on the beach to document the hurricane as it made landfall.

Their first indication of Katrina's true power

came as they watched the highway in front of the hotel

being swamped by the surge.

A storm surge does not look like a tsunami wave in any way.

Sometimes it gets perceived as that,

but it's more of a gradual rise in the water

and it just keeps coming and coming and coming.

Water's coming in the room through the air-conditioning vent.

What contributes to the deadliness

and destructiveness of the storm surge

is what does it hit initially?

What comes apart?

And, in essence, that debris becomes part of

an aquatic bulldozer blade pushing forward.

Oh, here it is. It's getting ready to break, guys.

Huge chunks of debris acted as a battering ram,

forcing their way into the lobby.

(MAN YELLS INDISTINCTLY)

We're currently on the second floor.

The storm is already coming up the stairs down here.

The first floor of the hotel -

the entire first floor is under water.

The storm surge was now at its peak, submerging the whole floor

and forcing its way up onto the next.

Trapped upstairs, Jim and Mike could only watch

as the surge destroyed the hotel directly under their feet.

What we saw was just breathtaking.

Refrigerators, televisions floating,

just people's homes, pieces of roof.

It was just total destruction at that point.

The roof collapsed on this building below me.

You can see the roof broke off.

The water was rushing through the ground floor

and you would see this wave actually going through the hotel

and coming out the back.

The surge hammered the hotel for two hours

before it finally retreated back to the ocean.

Holy cow!

This is the lobby.

This was the lobby.

All told, it's estimated that Katrina

caused more than $100 billion worth of damage.

When Jim and I finally got out of the hotel

and walked down the beach,

we couldn't believe the destruction we were witnessing

and the scale of the impact of the entire coastline

just completely decimated.

The storm surge brought so much water on shore

that the salt left behind poisoned two million hectares

of Mississippi forest.

It was the biggest forestry disaster in US history.

Even today, empty plots still scar

this once prosperous coastline,

a reminder that while hurricanes do their damage in a few hours,

their effects are felt for years.

A hurricane is a cluster of storms rotating around a centre

and in this centre is this nuclear-like power

that can change a country.

It's that powerful.

Hurricanes hit coastlines especially hard.

But being further inland doesn't guarantee safety.

Not when these storms bring the additional danger

of mudslides and torrential flooding.

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A town under water.

Flooding like this is the telltale sign of a hurricane.

As a storm gathers strength over the ocean,

it sucks enormous amounts of moisture into its giant clouds.

But when it hits land,

the storm collapses, dumping a huge amount of moisture

in the form of torrential rain.

Just one of these storms can drop 1.5m of rain in a single day.

When that much water falls on mountainous terrain,

it can trigger violent flash floods and mudslides.

There's one country that's more vulnerable

to these floods than anywhere else on Earth.

Taiwan.

A mountainous island located on the edge of the world's greatest ocean,

the Pacific.

It might seem peaceful,

but because of its unique location,

Taiwan is subject to violent weather.

Every summer, the Pacific generates massive hurricane-type storms.

But here they're known as typhoons.

These enormous storms sweep directly over the island

and as they collide with the steep mountains,

there are dramatic results.

Storm chasers Geoff Mackley and James Reynolds

come to Taiwan every year to witness these events.

Taiwan is like no other place on Earth

because you've got extremely big mountains

very close to the sea coast.

Within only a couple of miles,

the mountains rise up to 12,000ft and that's a recipe for chaos.

The mountains in the centre act as a brick wall, so to speak.

So when a typhoon sweeps ashore,

it's hitting this massive physical barrier

which just drains all the energy out of the storm.

In their death throes, they just dump

unimaginable quantities of rain.

In 2007, a category three storm called Typhoon Sepat

smashed into Taiwan.

When the storm drove up against the island,

it collapsed, unleashing an incredible deluge of rain.

The weather was furious at that point.

The rain was sheeting down, you could hardly see

more than 100ft. It was near white-out conditions.

In just 24 hours,

the typhoon had poured 73cm of rain onto the island.

By sunrise, the floods had reached gargantuan proportions.

It wasn't really until we hit the first bridge

over a major river that I realised that actually the storm's landfall

was only the first chapter of this story.

We could see this river, which must have been

at least half a mile wide

was just bank to bank, solid, raging flood waters.

All across Taiwan,

rivers overflowed and bridges were swept away.

But the most violent flooding happened in the island's

deep mountain gorges, where the narrow canyons

funnelled the water into torrents.

That's certainly the biggest and most awesome flash flood

that I've ever seen.

You've got millions of tons of water passing

the point you're standing every few minutes.

The more volume of water you have, the faster it moves

and, you know, it was probably doing 30mph, 40mph, and that's fast.

Fast-flowing water like this

can pick up almost any object in its path.

The river was raging. In places, it was overflowing

and the ground was shaking

as huge boulders were being washed down the river.

That was one of the most unnerving aspects.

Once these floods start, there's no way to stop them.

Thankfully, there were no towns in the steep gorges

that channelled the flood water from the mountains to the sea.

But when a typhoon triggered a flash flood

down one of Taiwan's populated valleys,

it led to disaster.

In September 2008,

the island was hit by Typhoon Sinlaku.

(HORN BLASTS)

The storm triggered flash floods in the mountains.

Raging down Taiwan's gorges,

the floods smashed everything in their path.

Hardest hit was the small, hillside village of Lushan.

Here the flood waters poured down the town's main street.

Storm chasers Geoff Mackley and James Reynolds were there.

Holy hell.

Everything's inundated. Look at all the buildings up there,

houses up to the roofs in water.

Two, three days of continuous cyclone-related rainfall

in this area is just a recipe for disaster.

You can see here, it's just a perfect example

of what can happen when things really go wrong.

The surging water was so powerful

even sturdy five-storey hotels fell like dominoes.

Every three cubic feet of water weighs a ton,

so that's thousands of tonnes of power

pushing on anything in its way.

A solid concrete parking complex here

has just been completely washed away as if it was made of matchsticks.

This flood was a killer, claiming eight lives in this region alone.

Across the island of Taiwan, four other people died that day.

Hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones.

These deadly storms are a global problem.

Around the world, they kill hundreds of people every year.

But even for survivors,

life after the storm is never the same again.

Back in the United States,

three months after Hurricane Ike ripped apart the coast of Texas...

...Mike Anderson and his wife, Dawn,

went back to see what was left of their neighbourhood.

There was a house on this empty lot here.

Her sons came and cleared that out. It was just totally demolished.

This house and that sort of blue-coloured house right there,

those weren't there before the storm.

They floated in from either an adjacent neighbourhood

or back towards the beach.

Mike and Dawn's house was one of the few still standing,

but the hurricane had wrecked it.

You know, I didn't notice the second time we came in here,

but this wall is moved.

This is totally off the slab right here.

And you can see this was our wall, you know,

and it's just... coming down.

That was the dining room.

Yeah, this was our dining room right here

and this was our living room.

This used to be where we - Christmases and Thanksgivings

and birthdays and birthday parties and friends and family.

For countless families up and down the coast,

it's the emotional aftermath that's so hard to come to terms with.

It just a matter of hours, your whole life's gone.

Everything you've worked years and years for is a pile of junk.

It's something that you have to respect.

You know, you just can't take it lightly.

You hear about Katrina, you know, those poor people.

But then when you go through it, then you understand

that what they went through is so devastating.

There's no way that it hasn't

completely changed how you look at things.

When hurricanes strike,

they tear apart entire countries.

Get out of the tree!

Get out of there!

They leave a trail of death and mass destruction

and wherever these monsters make landfall,

they unleash the full fury of Mother Nature.

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