Adyson Hammock
reporter@greenepublishing.com
Although Hurricane Idalia recently made her way through Florida, causing mass disruption and panic among residents, this definitely wasn’t the most destructive hurricane to ever hit Florida. Simply known as the Labor Day Hurricane, this storm occurred in 1935. To this day, it continues to hold the record for lowest pressure ever recorded at landfall for any hurricane in the Western Hemisphere. Residents of the Florida Keys, who were already rebuilding what they had lost to the Great Depression, were affected by the storm on Sept. 2, 1935, with peak winds of almost 200 miles per hour. Many of the residents in the Keys were WWI veterans who were working to rebuild railways to connect into the Keys after the Great Depression.
After going through the Keys, the storm left a 40-mile path of collapsed homes, thrown trees and destroyed buildings behind. The hurricane, now weakened, made a second landfall as a category 2 storm near Cedar Key, on Sept. 4, after recurving up north and paralleling the west coast of Florida. On Sept. 5, the storm had weakened to a tropical storm and moved across Georgia and the Carolinas. By the next day, the storm had made its way into Virginia, quickly regaining hurricane-level strength and picking up wind speeds. However, as it became extratropical, it became weaker immediately, until it finally became non-tropical on Sept. 10.
The Keys suffered the most damage from the Labor Day Hurricane, as well as fatalities. Four hundred and eight deaths were estimated from the storm, of which 244 were found dead, and 165 people missing. Previous forecasting errors from the Weather Bureau stated that the storm was going to pass through and go into the Gulf of Mexico. Because of this false prediction, residents of Florida stayed in their homes since they were told there was no need to evacuate. Soon, the Weather Bureau realized the storm was moving much slower than predicted, and changed their forecasting to say the storm would affect Cuba. However, when the actual path of the storm was finally determined, there was not enough time to evacuate Florida and the residents of the Keys had to stay where they were.
In the Keys, a monument sits at the site between US 1 at mile marker 81.5, carved out of Key Limestone, as a sign of respect and remembrance to the victims of the Labor Day Hurricane in 1935. The ashes of approximately 300 victims of the hurricane are inside the memorial. Some were buried in cemeteries, and some cremated in other places.