• Flight into the eye of death - a near fatal flight into one of the most powerful hurricanes of the 20th Century, as recounted by Flight Director of NOAA-42, Dr. Jeffrey Masters.

  The hot tropical sun beats down on me as I cross the tarmac at Barbados's Grantley Adams International Airport. I look to the northeast, scanning the sky for signs of Hurricane Hugo's outer cloud bands, but see only the puffy fair weather cumulus clouds typical of a tropical summer morning. I continue to the waiting aircraft. The flight engineers and maintenance crew are already hard at work, fueling the airplane and completing their pre-flight inspections. I climb the ladder and step into one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) P-3 Orion "Hurricane Hunter" aircraft--NOAA 42, affectionately called "The Princess", my partner in many memorable missions.       . . . . continued

The NOAA WP-3D Orion Hurricane Hunter aircraft

• Battered by Georges - a riveting account by politician and journalist, Tim Hector, who endured the massive Hurricane which pounded Antigua relentlessly for 12 hours in 1998.

Forecasting wind-speeds of 120 miles per hour was one thing, experiencing them was quite another. We had a double french door which pre-occupied Jennifer and I in the coming onslaught of Georges. It had been boarded over with the thicket plywood, the nails going deep into the wall. And yet at the onrush of Georges from north-east, the door, despite the covering plywood, danced a jig as if for a fig, in the howling winds of rockband Georges. Jennifer knew at once, that this five-foot wide french door was not dancing a modern romance to Georges remorseless strumming. This was a war dance. Not even Nijinksy could have followed the choreography of it. The door danced not from the top, or bottom, but without moving either, from the belly. At one stage, whether illusory or not, we saw the glass in the door bend, head back to heel, as in the preparatory moves of the limbo. Something had to be done.     
. . . continued

Hurricane Georges on its passage through the Caribbean island chain