The Caffeinated Politics blog has chased down some fascinating old video footage of the famous 1900 Galveston Hurricane. This storm made landfall as a Category 4 Hurricane and caused somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 deaths (the current population was 42,000), making it the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States.
The footage below was shot by an assistant to Thomas Edison using what was then an extremely rare movie camera. It shows a panoramic view of the destroyed Treemont Hotel.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izdonjcm1zk&feature=player_embedded#
. . . thank goodness for improved building codes, planning, and other changes in the way we build communities (though Hurricane Ike admittedly showed the limits to our current practices).
You can read all about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 on its Wikipedia page.