![]() ![]() A locomotive, tender and eleven cars would have to be assembled. For whatever reason, this was never done. The Florida East Coast Railway had previously informed Ghent that if he wanted a train that could be sent immediately, he would have to pay to keep one ready on a separate track. He would alert a special Florida East Coast Railway train in Miami to speed the 85 miles to Islamorada and retrieve the veterans.Īfter confirming that the hurricane was headed for the Keys, Ghent notified Miami at 1:59 pm to send the rescue train. The man overseeing the operation, Fred Ghent, the Florida Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, knew that the Keys were susceptible to hurricanes and had devised an evacuation plan. ![]() The veterans were housed in flimsy shacks that would disintegrate in a strong wind. The radius of its maximum winds was only about six miles, but if you were within those six miles at landfall your chance of survival was less than 50/50, and practically nil if you were caught out in the open. It was a tiny hurricane, but very compact and incredibly powerful. They also had no idea how strong the hurricane had become. Time was now a quickly diminishing asset and there was not enough time to evacuate the Keys. Fist fights were common and many drank away whatever money they earned to medicate themselves. Many suffered from PTSD, known then as shell shock, with no other way to earn a living during the Great Depression. These unfortunate souls, employed in miserable conditions for $1 a day plus food and housing, would find themselves at Ground Zero when the hurricane came ashore. There were also three World War One veterans’ work camps on Windley Key and Matecumbe Key employing 695 men building the Overseas Highway connecting the mainland with Key West. In 1935, the population of the entire Keys, not counting Key West, was only 865 residents, but there were an unknown number of tourists in the area celebrating the Labor Day weekend. The length of the Florida Keys, from Key Largo to Key West, is 133 miles. The waves in the sea below broke against each other as if they were striking a sea wall.” It appeared to be a cone-shaped body of clouds, inverted, rising to an altitude of 12,000 feet. Louis Dispatch, “I was able to fly close to the disturbance. Then he spied it far off in the distance, on a northwest collision course with the Florida Keys. To Povey’s surprise, the hurricane wasn’t anywhere near the coordinates the Weather Bureau projected. In the first recorded instance of a plane used to track a hurricane, Captain Leonard Povey, a Captain in the Aviation Corps of the Cuban Army and former circus performer, jumped into an open-cockpit Curtiss Hawk II biplane and soared into the sky to confirm it was heading toward Havana. As a safety precaution, hurricane warnings were broadcast from Key West north to Key Largo and planes dropped banners on areas without communication. The problem was that no one knew exactly where it was. The Weather Bureau’s 1:30 pm advisory on Labor Day, September 2nd placed the center of the hurricane 27 miles north of Isabela de Sagua, Villa Clara, Cuba (145 miles east of Havana) and projected it would pass through the Florida Straits on a westerly course. Over the next 24 hours, the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane exploded into a Category 5 killer. ![]() There was nothing now between the rapidly intensifying storm and the Florida Keys besides warm summer ocean water that is rocket fuel for hurricanes. It reached hurricane Category 1 intensity (74 mph) the next day, September 1st, near the south end of Andros Island, approximately 175 miles from Islamorada. The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane was born as a tropical depression on August 31st, near Long Island in the southeastern Bahamas, a scant 375 miles from Islamorada in the center of the Florida Keys. The breeding ground for most hurricanes is thousands of miles away, off the northern coast of Africa near Cape Verde. These reports could be highly inaccurate, especially if a hurricane suddenly intensified from a Category 1 to a Category 5 monster. Even though there were plenty of ships at any given time, the information they provided gave meteorologists, at best, a general idea of the storm’s location. Weathermen relied on ship-to-shore reports. In 1935, there was no radar to track hurricanes as they came barreling in from the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico. The problem with those statistics is that there is plenty of evidence to refute each. The official numbers are sustained winds of 185 mph, barometric pressure of 892 mb and 485 fatalities. No one will ever know the true wind speed, barometric pressure or death toll of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, the most powerful Atlantic storm to make landfall on the United States. ![]()
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