Hurricane Floyd threatens to join Camille, Hugo and Andrew in the grim roll-call of vicious hurricanes to strike the US coast as it bears down on Florida with steady winds of 150 m.p.h.
Floyd steamrollered through the Bahamas just a hair below classification as a Category Five hurricane, the top designation on the storm forecasters' scale of weather catastrophe.
"The best thing to do is to prepare for the worst," the deputy director of the US National Hurricane Centre, Mr Max Mayfield, told a news conference.
Forecasters calculated feverishly to determine when and where Floyd might hit Florida, and emergency officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for residents of low-lying areas and mobile homes in the storm's path.
With sustained winds of at least 156 m.p.h. (251 k.p.h), Category Five storms attack shore areas with pounding winds and rains that level many buildings, tear roofs off others and flood huge areas.
Only two hurricanes are known to have been Category Five storms when they struck land in the United States. The Category Five Labour Day hurricane of 1935, which hit the Florida Keys, the low-lying island chain south-west of Miami, killed 408 people. Category Five Hurricane Camille went ashore and killed 256 people in Mississippi and Louisiana in 1969.
Andrew was a Category Four storm when it struck south of Miami in 1992, devastating a swathe of the state and causing $26.5 billion in damage. Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which bore a $7 billion price tag as it struck a vicious blow in Charleston, South Carolina, was also Category Four.
Categories do not necessarily determine the destructiveness of a storm. A weather system with relatively low winds but high volumes of rain can also be very deadly.
Hurricane Mitch reached Category Five status and was classified as one of the five most intense storms ever recorded in the Atlantic storm basin well before it hit shore. But it became perhaps the deadliest hurricane ever recorded after it had lost most of its strength, claiming some 9,000 lives due mostly to flooding and mudslides as it dumped up to six feet of rain on Nicaragua and Honduras.
Mitch's torrential rains generated flash floods and mudslides that engulfed entire villages, then left survivors isolated as they battled diseases which claimed more lives.
Hurricane Georges, which killed more than 500 people on its march through the Dominican Republic and Haiti last September, also did its worst damage through flooding.
The deadliest hurricane to strike the United States was an unnamed Category Four storm which hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900, killing more than 8,000 people. The second deadliest was an unnamed 1928 hurricane that hit the Lake Okeechobee area of Florida, killing 1,836.
More than a dozen Category Four storms, with winds ranging from 131 to 155 m.p.h. have hit the United States.
The deadliest hurricane ever in the Atlantic storm basin - which includes the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico - was the "Great Hurricane" of 1780, which killed about 22,000 people in the eastern Caribbean.
The costliest hurricane in history, according to a recent study, was the unnamed 1926 hurricane which hit Miami Beach, a devastating tempest that swamped coastal areas and obliterated beaches.
In a 1998 study a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist-calculated that the 1926 storm would have caused $80.6 billion in damage had it hit Miami Beach in modern times.