By September, 1926, the population of Dade County and
the young City of Miami had blossomed to well over 100,000 (more than
doubling from the census figure of 42,753 in 1920) and construction was
everywhere. Smaller nearby settlements of
Lemon City, Cocoanut
Grove, and Little River were absorbed as Miami swelled with new
residents; optimistic, speculative, and woefully under-educated about
hurricanes. New buildings were constantly starting on Miami
Beach, which had been built across Biscayne Bay on a series of barrier
islands, bulldozed from their mangrove beginnings.
The U.S. Government, including the Department of Agriculture, Weather
Bureau recognized that Miami would soon be an
important American city with tremendous growth and economic potential.
In 1900, the cooperative weather station originally started in 1895 in
Lemon City (about 5 miles north near NE 2nd Avenue and 61st Streeti)
was moved to Miami. In June, 1911, a first order
Weather Bureau Office was established in downtown Miami, headed by Richard Gray.
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 story of what happened over the next 12 hours is best told by those
who lived through it at the Weather Bureau Office. Click on the links
below to read the official record written by Official-in-Charge Richard
Gray of the Miami Weather Bureau Office.
The eye of the hurricane, with its period of relative calm, passed over
downtown Miami and parts of Cocoanut Grove and South Miami around 630
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.
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.
Barnes, J., 1998: Florida’s
Hurricane History. The University of North Carolina Press, 330
pp.
Douglas, M. S., 1958: Hurricane.
Rinehart and Company, Inc., 393 pp.
Dunn, G. E., and B. I. Miller, 1960: Atlantic
Hurricanes. Louisiana State University Press, 326 pp.
Dunn, M., 1997: Black Miami in the
Twentieth Century. University Press of Florida, 414 pp.
George, P. S., 1996: Miami—One hundred years of history. South
Florida Hist., 24 (2),
22–36.
Hamm, H.H., 1926: 101 Views of the
South Florida Hurricane, September 17–18, 1926. Schwartz
News Co., 47 pp.
Jarrell, J. D., M. Mayfield, E. N. Rappaport, and C. Landsea, 2001: The
deadliest, costliest, and most intense United States hurricanes from
1900 to 2000 (and other frequently requested hurricane facts). NOAA
Tech. Memo. NWS-TPC-3, 29 pp.
Landsea, Christopher W., 2006: personal communication.
Mitchell, C. L., 1926: The West Indian Hurricane of September 14-22,
1926. Mon. Wea. Rev., 54, 409–414.
Pfost, Russell, 2003: Reassessing the Impact of Two
Historical Florida Hurricanes. Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society, 84, 1367-1372.
Pielke, R.A., and C. W. Landsea, 1998: Normalized Hurricane Damages in
the United States: 1925–95. Wea.
Forecasting, 13,
621–631.
Rappaport, E. N., and J. Fernández-Partagás, 1995: The
deadliest Atlantic tropical cyclones, 1492—1994. NOAA Tech. Memo. NWS NHC-47, 41 pp.
Reardon, L. F., 1926: The Florida
Hurricane and Disaster. Reprinted 1986, Lion and Thorne
Publishers, 112 pp.
Tannehill, I. R., 1943: Hurricanes:
Their Nature and History, Particularly Those of the West Indies and the
Southern Coasts of the United States. 4th ed. Princeton
University Press, 257 pp.
Tyler, L. L., 1926: A Pictorial
History of the Florida Hurricane, September 18, 1926. The Tyler
Publishing Co., 32 pp.
National Weather Service
South Florida Weather Forecast Office
11691 SW 17th Street
Miami, FL, 33165
(305) 229-4550, weather info
(305) 229-4522, administrative
Web Master's E-mail:
sr-mfl.webmaster@noaa.gov
Page last modified: July 14, 2008