Category 5: Profile of a killer
From the "Wolf Blitzer Reports" staff
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 Hurricane Ivan brings massive rain and high winds to Cuba.
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| CATEGORY 5 HURRICANES | U.S. landfalls:
- Unnamed storm, 1935, Florida
- Camille, 1969, Mississippi
- Andrew, 1992, Florida
Source: NOAA
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(CNN) -- Category 5 hurricanes are monsters. From space, they appear to swallow islands and countries whole. On the ground, they are hell on Earth.
With winds in excess of 155 miles an hour, they lay waste to almost everything in their path including buildings, trees, shrubs and signs.
And what the wind spares, water claims instead. Storm surges usually top 18 feet -- sometimes cutting off coastal escape routes.
Since 1900, only three Category 5 storms have hit the United States.
Infamous Hurricane Andrew pummeled south Florida August 24 1992. It caused more than $26 billion damage in the United States and killed at least 23 people.
Andrew was so powerful it destroyed official wind gauges. A review of data 10 years later led the National Hurricane Center to posthumously upgrade the storm from Category 4 to 5.
The only comparable storms to have hit the United States were an un-named hurricane that swept over the Florida Keys in 1935 and Hurricane Camille in 1969.
Camille slammed into Mississippi August 17 with sustained winds now estimated at near 200 miles an hour -- and a storm surge of almost 25 feet that soaked the coast. One hundred forty-three people died in Camille's first strike -- her remnants went on to drop more than two feet of rain over parts of the Virginias where another 113 people were killed.
But Camille's floods were dwarfed by those of Hurricane Mitch, a late-season Category 5 that decimated parts of Central America in October 1998.
By the time it made landfall in Honduras, Mitch had weakened to a Category 1, but the storm's intense rains brought flooding and landslides that killed, according to the National Climactic Data Center, at least 6,500 people and left up to 11,000 missing.
