This was another show for the Naked Science strand for National Geographic US. We were asked to investigate what happens to the human body when it is exposed to the extremes of nature and find stories of individuals who have been subjected to near-death experiences as a result.  

We started by conducting a series of experiments on presenter Louise Brady who turned out to have an unbreakable will and a steely physique.  

Lou, a long-time friend which was just as well, was chilled in freezing water, asked to run on a treadmill in 40 deg C and frozen by a blast of arctic air.  Lou lasted 17 minutes in the water – try running into the sea in December and time how long you stay there and I can almost guarantee you won’t make it past a minute – and she clocked up 45 minutes on the treadmill running in the equivalent of the Arizona desert.  

We filmed the changes in her skin temperature with an infra red camera and monitored her core temperature. Your body loses heat 30 times faster in water than in air, which is why it is so dangerous to be exposed to immersion in the sea.  

Then we met Tony Bullimore who survived three days in freezing South Atlantic waters when he capsized on the Southern Oceans race, a boy from Oklahoma who was hit by lightning and suffered frontal lobe damage in his brain, and a delightful lady who was taken ill in Houston, Texas the night it was almost submerged under a tropical rainstorm called Allison which parked over the city and dumped several feet of rain.  

The most upsetting story was about the victims of the Oklahoma City tornado which ran a channel a mile wide directly through the city turning everything in its wake to matchwood.  

To replicate the sort of damage impacts from hailstones and pieces of debris can do in a hailstorm or a tornado, we filmed the impact of projectiles ranging from a jellybean to a four inch hailstone on a melon, a sheet of Perspex and a car door.  

Using a 1000 frame per second camera, we watched with a sort of fascinated horror as the jellybean went clean through a sheet of Perspex a centimeter thick, a half inch hailstone exploded the melon and a four inch hailstone went through the double skin of a car door like a missile.  

Boscastle, North Cornwall was still wrecked when I visited it with my partner in crime James Buchanan. We relived the experience though the eyes of Richard and Rachelle Strauss who had almost drowned in the flash flood which swept though the town. We met them on their first return journey to the town which had almost wiped out their family. It was pretty traumatic for them and the whole nightmare came back as they talked to me.  

Almost every car in the town was washed into the sea, such was the power of the floodwater which raised the small stream running through the town to a torrent thirty feet deep.  

It was caused by the fact that the town sits in a weather system where the warm wet Atlantic weather meets rain channeled down the three valleys surrounding the town and wet air from the Bristol channel blows south for good measure. The valley is a natural funnel and any sudden water flow is concentrated to lethal effect.  

It’s known locally for its sudden intense downpours and the storm which caused this disaster was just much more intense and prolonged than usual.  

The power of nature at its angriest is a very scary thing indeed and my respect for its power only increases the more I discover about the subject.