In the predawn hours of March 28, 1979, a reactor of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, began to overheat. The lives of half a million people soon hung in the balance, as human error and mechanical failure combined to create the worst nuclear accident in American history.

In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys, and the Percys against themselves. A dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America's greatest natural disasters.