80th anniversary of disastrous 1926 Hurricane

[zlaxier]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15538355.htm

Eighty years ago today and Monday, an immense hurricane -- stronger than Katrina when it struck New Orleans -- ransacked South Florida.

The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 killed hundreds and left bodies floating in Biscayne Bay. The Atlantic swamped much of Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Miami Beach. Ten thousand buildings were destroyed or damaged.

''The houses all around us were blown down,'' Grace Wisell of Miami wrote a few days after the storm. ``Trucks with mattresses in them are used for ambulances and they are piling dead bodies on top of each other.''

Can a similarly monstrous storm hit us again? Not only can it happen again, experts say, it will happen again, and the cost will be dreadful.

''If it happened in 1926, it certainly can happen in 2006, 2007 or any year,'' said Rusty Pfost, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service's South Florida office.

If the same storm struck the same area in the same way today, damage could exceed $80 billion, according to emergency managers and forecasters. Some residents could swelter without electricity for months. Several feet of seawater could invade homes in Miami Beach, Miami, Hallandale Beach, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and other cities.

Pfost is particularly worried about people who live along the coast, but he said the entire region must be aware of what it faces.

Back then, about 200,000 people lived in Broward and what is now called Miami-Dade. Now, about four million live here.

''There's a significantly higher number of people at risk,'' Pfost said. ``And most don't really know the hurricane history of this area.''

One chapter of that history is reserved for the 1926 hurricane, which punished the entire region from Homestead to Lake Okeechobee.

It arrived by night, catching nearly everyone by surprise, and it lingered for nearly 18 hours.

Its sustained winds exceeded 135 mph and probably reached 150 mph, making it about as powerful as Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but much larger and slower.

Its storm surge -- the dome of water pushed ashore by the eye wall -- towered at 12 feet, according to some accounts.

''The surge completely inundated the barrier islands,'' Pfost said. ``Think about all the people who live there now, and just about everyone has no idea what could happen.''

Forecasting and media operations were far less sophisticated back then and relatively few people were aware that Richard Gray, the local weather chief, issued a storm advisory at 10 a.m. on Sept. 17. A hurricane warning came just before 6 p.m., but it was too late.

The leading edge of the hurricane arrived before midnight and conditions deteriorated until 6:10 a.m., when the eye passed directly over downtown Miami.

At that point, many residents crawled out of shattered homes, toured their neighborhoods -- and then died, caught without shelter when the back half of the storm attacked suddenly and viciously.

''I warned those in the vicinity of the Federal Building that the storm was not over and that it would be dangerous to remain in the open,'' Gray wrote in his official post-storm report.

''The lull lasted 35 minutes, and during that time the streets of the city became crowded with people,'' he wrote. ``As a result, many lives were lost during the second phase of the storm.''

The hurricane killed 75 people in Miami-Dade, 60 people in Broward and hundreds elsewhere, particularly around Lake Okeechobee, where a portion of the dike collapsed. (Two years later, another hurricane killed thousands in that area when storm surge breached the low dike.)

The 1926 storm brought the region to its knees economically, reversing a real estate boom and giving South Florida an unwanted head start on the Great Depression. In today's dollars, it inflicted more than $2 billion in damage on an area far less developed than it is today.

''It was almost a worst-case scenario,'' Pfost said.

South Florida has been fortunate so far this year -- only Tropical Storm Ernesto came calling and it mostly fizzled. Other, much more powerful storms have curved away from the region, pushed out to sea by beneficial atmospheric conditions.

But the season is not over and, sooner or later -- this year or next or the one after that -- those steering currents will change again.

Even now, many South Floridians are still living in houses damaged last year by hurricanes Katrina and Wilma.

Katrina was a minimal Category 1 hurricane when it hit Broward and Miami-Dade (and a Category 3 when it struck New Orleans). Wilma was a borderline Category 1 or 2 hurricane when it swept through South Florida.

Now consider: The 1926 storm was a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Through the cruel calculus of such things, that made it capable of inflicting about 250 times the damage of either Katrina or Wilma on South Florida.

Pfost, who now has Richard Gray's job, said it all serves as a lesson that must not be forgotten.

''We somehow have to get people to understand what has happened here in the past, because it is going to happen again,'' he said. ``It absolutely will. We just don't know when.''

[cajungal]

Another bad hurricane hit Louisiana that same year. It hit around Terrebonne Parish. 120 mph winds were recorded in Thibodaux. And Thibodaux was probably over 50 miles inland back in 1926. Thibodaux lost 10 stores and a warehouse. Telephone poles were snapped in half. My neighbor who is now 94 was 14 at the time of the storm. She still remembers vividly.

[EDR1222]

There is some great reading material on that hurricane and also the one that came ashore just north of there near Palm Beach only two years later. That one was said to be even more intense at landfall. Very severe hurricanes indeed.