On the night of September 16, 1928, a hurricane swung up from Puerto Rico and collided, quite unexpectedly, with Palm Beach, Florida. The powerful winds from the storm burst a dike and sent a twenty-foot wall of water through three towns, killing over 2,000 people. Robert Mykle shows how the residents of the Everglades had believed prematurely that they had tamed nature, how racial attitudes at the time compounded the disaster, and how in the aftermath the cleanup of rapidly decaying corpses was such a horrifying task that some workers went mad.