The Great Miami Hurricane Of 1926

By Paul Homewood

 

 

WUWT ran a post the other day about a study last year, which purported to show that storm surges from Atlantic hurricanes were on the increase. Willis Eschenbach rather pulled the rug from under the study’s conclusions.

However, I noticed from the Supplementary Information issued with the paper, and linked by Willis, that the top of the list for storm surge was the 1926 Miami hurricane, known ever since as “The Great Miami Hurricane”. According to the paper, the hurricane had a storm surge rating of 283,compared to Katrina’s rating of 113. (Katrina, incidentally, was only 5th on the list).

Which got me wondering, just how bad was it?

 

Roger Pielke has done a lot of work trying to assess the relative economic cost of damage from hurricanes in today’s values. He takes account of inflation down the years, but also factors such as increasing population, wealth etc. His list also puts the Miami hurricane way ahead at the top of the list, so it was clearly something pretty cataclysmic.

 

http://forecast.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/shadow/docs/Pielkeetal2006a.pdf

 

The NWS have a page devoted to the hurricane and some of the excerpts are shown below.

 

The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 was of classic Cape Verde origin, first known to the Weather Bureau from ship reports in the central tropical Atlantic on September 11.  It passed north of the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico on the 14th, 15th, and 16th, avoiding normal channels of Caribbean information.  Therefore, in those days before satellite pictures and reconnaissance aircraft, the hurricane remained somewhat of a mystery, with only a few ship reports to tell of its existence.
In those days, storm warnings were centralized in Washington, DC, and disseminated to field offices like Miami.  However, as late as the morning of September 17, less than 24 hours before the category 4 storm’s effects would begin in South Florida, no warnings had been issued.  At noon, the Miami Weather Bureau Office was authorized to post storm warnings (one step below hurricane, or winds of 48 to 55 knots).  It was only as the barometer began a precipitous fall, around 11 PM the night of September 17, that Gray hoisted hurricane warnings. 

The eye of the hurricane, with its period of relative calm, passed over downtown Miami and parts of Cocoanut Grove and South Miami around 6.30 AM on September 18.  Residents of the city, unfamiliar with hurricanes, thought the storm was over and emerged from their places of refuge out into the city streets.  People even began returning to the mainland from Miami Beach.  The lull lasted only about 35 minutes, according to Gray, during which the streets became "crowded with people".  The worst part of the hurricane, with onshore southeasterly winds bringing a 10 foot storm surge onto Miami Beach and the barrier islands, began around 7 AM and continued the rest of the morning.  At the height of the storm surge, the water from the Atlantic extended all the way across Miami Beach and Biscayne Bay into the City of Miami for several city blocks

As the hurricane moved inland, water from Lake Okeechobee was blown toward the southwest shore and the pioneer town of Moore Haven (founded in 1915). By midmorning on Saturday, September 18, the weakened muck dike that had been constructed to protect Moore Haven had broken in several places, and lake water rose higher and higher into the town, sweeping through buildings and causing some of them to leave their foundations and be wrecked or driven away by howling winds. About 150 persons were drowned in the flood waters that persisted in Moore Haven for weeks afterward. On October 9, well after the hurricane, the Red Cross reported that 372 persons had died in the storm and over 6,000 persons were injured. Damages in 1926 dollars were estimated at $105 million, which would be more than $100 billion in today’s dollars. The 1926 Miami Hurricane made a second landfall in Florida on September 20 near Pensacola before moving on in a weakened state to coastal Mississippi and Louisiana on September 21.

 

Perhaps the one statistic that really does sum up how disastrous the storm was is that an estimated 25000 to 50000 were left homeless, mainly in the Miami area. According to the NWS, Miami’s population at the time was just over 100,000. In other words, it is possible that nearly half of Miami’s population was left homeless.

 

The following photos are all from NWS.