At about six the next morning, Nargis slammed into Burma’s southwestern coast, with winds of up to 215 miles an hour. An enormous storm surge followed, and a wall of water twelve feet high pushed as far as twenty-five miles inland. On the evening of May 2, the cyclone passed over Rangoon, weaker but still able to lash the city of five million with torrential wind and rain, felling thousands of trees and damaging hundreds of buildings, before disappearing over the eastern hills. For the delta—a level landscape of five million people nearly all living in rickety wooden houses—Nargis was a
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