IHRC: Historical Hurricanes

Florida's Historical Hurricanes
Emily Manderson

Introduction
1926-1979
1985-Present
Resources

Introduction

As I researched the history of Florida hurricanes, I have discovered that hurricanes make history because they forever change the lives of men, women and especially children who survive. Natural disasters become etched into a collective memory when they throw people's lives into chaos and the natural world overwhelms our daily routines. Having grown up in Houston, Texas, I too have vivid memories of hurricane Alicia. I remember driving downtown after the storm and seeing the once slick and shinny office buildings shattered with their windows blown out. At the time I do not think I realized the lesson of impermanence; however I now know that is what we take home from these events. Our lives are fragile, our world is vulnerable, and we are subject to constant changes- some grander than others. We must learn from the past and try to live in harmony with the natural world.

Florida's geographic location persuades us to be more aware of the past hurricanes since history guarantees that they will come again with the same or greater fury. We can identify patterns and commonalities between storms just as human history helps us learn from our society's disasters. - Emily

Human affairs and meteorology intertwine to weave the history of tropical cyclones in South Florida. The first people to live in what are now Broward, Collier, Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties reckoned time by the cycles of their lives and of the seasons. They left no records of the tempests they survived beyond fables that faded in a generation or two. With the coming of Europeans, written records, first in meticulous Spanish and then English, began---but generally only of storms that sank ships or devastated settlements. The quantitative record of Atlantic hurricanes begins in 1851, and actually starts to be reliable just before the turn of the 20th Century.

South Florida population growth for Florida Counties

Coincidentally it was in 1896, when the Florida East Coast Railway reached Miami that settlement of South Florida by North Americans began. The milestones of the human story were the railroad, post World War I real-estate boom, Depression, World War II, a second post-war boom in air-conditioned comfort, arrival of Cuban émigrés after Fidel Castro came to power across the Straits of Florida, and a second wave of emigration with the Mariel boatlift.

Against the background of rampant development, hurricane landfalls varied in a multi-decadal cycles. During the first four decades of the 20th Century, South Florida experienced an average of four landfalls a decade. Then in the 1940s, the incidence doubled. During the 1950s only one hurricane struck South Florida, but the 60s saw nearly as many landfalls as the 1940s. Then the situation changed dramatically. After Betsy and Inez in 1965 and 1966, only three hurricanes struck Florida south of 26° North Latitude: Floyd of 1987, Andrew of 1992, and Irene of 1999. Is it reasonable to expect that the good fortune of the last third of the 20th Century will continue?

South Florida Landfalls by Decade 1900-2000	US Landfalls by Decade 1900-2000

Though other storms came before, it was in 1559 that Spanish Explorers recorded the first hurricane in Florida, The Great Tempest. It demolished 7 of 13 Don Tristan de Luna y Arreland's ships at anchor in what is now known as Pensacola Bay. This hurricane deterred Spain from attempting to colonize the area again for another 164 years. Subsequently, sixteen more hurricanes struck before 1886. The time intervals between them varied widely. A few are lumped together and some fall within the same year. For example in 1852, one hurricane struck in August and then two months later in October another landed, leaving St. Marks and Newport underwater for days. It appears that 1886 is a breaking point in historical Florida hurricane recordings; after that year hurricane recordings become dramatically more detailed and frequent.

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1926-1979

The Great 1926 Miami Hurricane: This disastrous event caused 243 deaths and damage that exceeded $1.5 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. It was a Category 4 storm accompanied by a low-pressure reading of 935 mb (27.61 inches of Mercury) with storm surge that rose 9 feet on Miami Beach and 8 feet at the Miami waterfront. In Coconut grove the storm surge reached nearly 15 feet. Most of the deaths occurred as the eye of the storm passed and many people, who had never been in a hurricane before, went outside believing that the hurricane was over. As described in Galbraith's (1955) The Great Crash: 1929, the hurricane of 1926 was one of several factors that cooled the Jazz-Age speculative frenzy in Miami real-estate and brought the depression to South Florida three years before equity values collapsed worldwide.

San Felipe-Okeechobee Hurricane 1928: Two years later, another Category 4 hurricane hit Florida, causing Lake Okeechobee to surge up to 9 feet. It drowned more than 1800 people predominantly African Americans, who were ill served by the rudimentary emergency management of those segregated times.

To the people who died in the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. The monument contains the remains of more than 300 cremated citizens

The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 struck the middle Keys at the bottom of the Depression and compounded the economic catastrophe with a natural one. As quoted by Barnes (1998), it began as "shifting gales and probably winds of hurricane force" in the Straits of Florida on September 1st. In light of modern understanding, we can reconstruct that it deepened rapidly to become a compact, extreme Category 5 hurricane before it rampaged across Upper and Lower Metacumbe Keys. Contemporary reports describe winds approaching 200 mph during the night of September 2nd. The record low sea-level pressure measured on Lower Metacumbe Key, 1992 mb (26.35 in), stood until 1988, when a NOAA Research Aircraft extrapolated 888 mb (26.23 in) in Hurricane Gilbert in the Western Caribbean.

A train sent to rescue both World War I veterans working to construct the Overseas Highway started too late. On the return trip, hurricane winds and storm surge swept the cars from the tracks and then uprooted the rail bed. Officially, the 1935 Keys Hurricane ended 408 lives. Scenarios in which an identical storm strikes the modern Keys indicate that we might not fair so well, even with early in the 21st Century forecasting, communications, and mobility.

The Florida West-Coast Hurricane of 1944 formed, as many late-season hurricanes do, over the pool of still-warm water in the western Caribbean. It was picked up by a passing midlatitude trough, whisked across Cuba near Havana, then over the Dry Tortugas and diagonally across central Florida from Charlotte Harbor to Jacksonville. The 1944 hurricane had a huge, elliptical eye with a major axis that extended 70 miles along the storm track, bringing 100 mph winds to Tampa and Orlando. Barnes (1998) reports $13M damage in Florida, and loss of 13 lives.

In September 1945 a Category three hurricane struck southern Miami-Dade County, causing widespread agricultural losses and devastating the Richmond-Field Naval Air Station where wind-driven fires consumed blimps, airplanes, and hangers. It also caused widespread coastal flooding around Biscayne Bay.

George, the first of the two hurricanes to strike South Florida in 1947 was a Cape Verde hurricane that made landfall near Fort Lauderdale. Although it was a large, slow-moving Category 4 hurricane at landfall, the damage was surprisingly light and it killed only 17 people. The second 1947 hurricane was King (not to be confused with King of 1950), an October storm that struck Florida from the southwest and caused extensive flooding in Dade County. Water remained standing in many places for months.

Hurricane King of 1950 was another October storm that started life in the western Caribbean, but King crossed central Cuba near Camaquey, farther east than most October storms. It accelerated northward and struck Miami. King was stronger than expected and its eye contracted from 30 miles to 6 miles in diameter in the last 18 h before landfall. This transformation is consistent with rapid deepening in low shear over the warm Gulf Stream. Its strongest winds were just below 100 kt as it passed through the city, but damage seems to have been confined within four or five miles of the hurricane's track. King caused $28M in damage (uncorrected) and killed 6 people.

Hurricane Donna 1960: Donna ranks as one of Florida's most intense hurricanes as well as costliest. It is the only hurricane on record to spread hurricane-force winds from Florida, through the Mid-Atlantic States, to New England. The storm surge along the southwest coast of Florida reached 11 ft. Donna is the fifth strongest recorded hurricane to hit the United States with a landfall pressure of 930mb (27.46 in).

In 1964, three Category 2 hurricanes struck Florida, Cleo, Dora, and Isbell. Cleo passed northward up the east coast of the peninsula from Miami to the Georgia border in late August. Dora tracked westward across the state from St Augustine, over Tallahassee, into southern Alabama in early September. Isbell formed in mid-October over the western Caribbean, crossed Cuba near Havana, passed over Key West, made landfall near Everglades City, and blew across Jupiter Inlet into the Atlantic. These hurricanes killed fewer than ten Floridians, and caused relatively light damage.

Satellite image of Betsy which was one of the first hurricanes track in that manner becoming a milestone in hurricane tracking methods

Like most large and powerful Atlantic Hurricanes, Betsy of 1965, began as an African wave that moved northwestward over the Lesser Antilles and became a hurricane north of Puerto Rico. Then it weakened and made an anticyclonic loop 200 miles north of Miami's latitude. Betsy emerged from the loop on a southwestward track through the Bahamas that carried it over the Florida Keys near the 1935 Hurricane's landfall point. During this phase of its life, Betsy intensified to Category 3. It had a 40-mile diameter eye and spread > 100 mph winds from the Lower Keys to southern Miami-Dade County. It caused widespread salt-water flooding from the Keys through Biscayne Bay. Betsy killed 13 people in Florida. After it pounded the Keys, it tracked across the Gulf of Mexico to a second landfall in Louisiana, where it killed 58 and caused $1.2B (unadjusted for inflation) in damage.

Inez in 1966 was a late-September, early-October Cape Verde Hurricane that became very intense and devastated the Lesser Antilles. It passed through the Bahamas and Florida Keys on its way to landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula and mainland Mexico. Mercifully, Inez visited Florida as a Category 1 hurricane. Apart from a near miss by Hurricane David in 1979 and Floyd's passage thorough the keys in 1987, Betsy and Inez were the last hurricanes to affect Southeast Florida for the next 26 years.

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1985-Present

Hurricane Juan 1985: Though this hurricane was only at Category 1 intensity by the time it reached the panhandle, it is considered on of Florida's most costly hurricanes because Juan's tropical deluge caused 1.8 billion dollars of damage. Hurricane Juan is currently ranked as the 14th costliest hurricane in U.S history.

Hurricane Andrew 1992: On August 24 Hurricane Andrew made landfall in Dade County, Florida and entered history as the most destructive United States hurricane. As Category 5 hurricane, Andrew was the most expensive natural disaster in the US history resulting in damage estimated at $27 billion 1992 dollars. Andrew's storm surge rose 17ft. In the US, 23 deaths resulted from Andrew, and three more people died in the Bahamas. The central pressure at landfall was 922mb (27.23 in). At the time, forecasters estimated Andrew's peak winds at 142 mph, near the top of Category 4. As a result of insights stemming from observations of near-surface winds with GPS dropsones the original data were reinterpreted. In light of this new understanding Andrew's best-track surface winds increased to 165 kt, classifying Andrew as a Category 5. Thus, the quantitative record now contains 3 Category 5 hurricanes that have struck the United States: Andrew, Camille of 1969 and the Keys Labor-Day Hurricane of 1935.

Federal disaster response, construction fraud, insurance exposure, environmental damage, and code enforcement all became the front-burner issues in the wake of this thoroughly modern hurricane- Jay Barnes

Hurricane Opal 1995: On October 3rd the eye pressure was 965mb and dropped during the night to 916mb in less that 18 hours. On October the 4th Florida's coastal residents awoke to a much more extreme storm approaching. When Hurricane Opal made Florida landfall it was barely a category 3 storm, having weakened abruptly over colder coastal waters. Most of Opal's damage was caused from storm surge, which did not have time to weaken drastically before reaching the shore. The western Florida Panhandle coast was inundated by 10 to 20 ft of surge that caused $3 billion dollars in damage.

In 1999 Hurricane Floyd, a large and intense Cape Verde Hurricane threatened, but did not affect, Southeast Florida on its way to a disastrous landfall on the mid-Atlantic states. But the season was by no means over; in mid-October Hurricane Irene formed in the western Caribbean and followed the usual late-season track across the Keys and over the Florida peninsula from southwest to northeast. Although hurricane-force winds seem to have remained offshore, Irene precipitated more than a foot of rainwater as it moved through Southeast Florida, resulting in widespread flooding in the Miami metropolitan area, including FIU's University Park Campus. Irene ended 8 lives and caused $800M in damage.

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Resources

A history of hurricanes in the western Florida Panhandle 1559-1999 http://www.eglin.af.mil/weather/hurricaes/history.html

Hurricane Preparedness-Hurricane History
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/HAW2/english/history.shtml

Hurricanes: Their Nature and Impacts on Society Roger A. Pielke Jr., Roger A. Pielke Sr.

Florida's Hurricane History-Foreword by Neil Frank Jay Barnes

Hebert, Paul J., Jerry D. Jarrell, and Max Mayfield, 1995. The deadliest, costliest, and most intense United States hurricanes of this century (and other frequently requested hurricane facts.)

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