Reports from the U.S. Weather Bureau early on the morning of Monday, September 2, 1935 indicated the presence of a “tropical disturbance of small diameter but considerable intensity moving slowly westward just off the coast of northern Cuba.” The forecast called for the hurricane to pass through the Florida Straits that day. The Weather Bureau warned of high tides and gales on the Florida Keys.
Meteorologists in Cuba read the reports but knew something was wrong. The U.S. weathermen had the storm about 200 miles east of Havana, heading toward the Cuabn capital. But the Cubans’ barometers were rising. They knew the storm was not heading toward them.
Meanwhile in the Keys, skies were cloudy and barometers were falling. The wind was beginning to pick up. Something was wrong. The hurricane was not where the U.S. Weather Bureau thought it was, and it was growing into a monster. They had no satellites or reconnaissance planes to tell them how fast it was intensifying.
This is the weather map from that morning.
The official reports indicated the hurricane was about 150 miles southeast of Matecumbe Key in the Florida Keys. It was actually less than 90 miles east southeast of Matecumbe. It was heading west at 3 mph, but that speed would increase.
Less than 24 hours before, the top winds had been 75 mph, barely a hurricane. That had nearly doubled by the morning of the 2nd to 140 mph as the hurricane drew its strength from the extremely warm waters between the Bahamas and Keys. It would intensify even further, peaking out with top winds of 160 mph by nightfall.
It was the peak of the depression and times were hard. World War I veterans were employed as part of a relief project to build an overseas highway across the Keys to Key West in order to open up tourism in the area. Over 700 men were in camps along the Keys, but as many as half of them had gone to Miami to see a baseball game on this Labor Day.
As conditions worsened, the Weather Bureau ordered hurricane warning flags hoisted in the Keys. Urgent requests were made to the Florida East Coast Railroad in Miami to send a train to pick up the veterans. A series of snafus and miscommunications caused the relief train not to leave until late afternoon.
When the train finally started south from Miami about 4:25 p.m., weather conditions had already deteriorated and the storm center was nearly onshore. Wind blown debris on the track and an open drawbridge delayed the train even further and it never reached most of the people it was sent to rescue.
At 4:30 p.m., Weather Bureau advisories recognized that the hurricane was further north than they had earlier thought, but it was too late.
By the time it reached Matecumbe Key, the storm surge was already inundating the low lying islands and extreme winds were blasting the area. The surge derailed all of the train cars except for the locomotive.
The barometric pressure measured at Long Key remains the second lowest pressure reading ever measured in the Western Hemisphere (26.35 inches/892 mb) and the lowest observed in the United States. Winds exceeded 200 mph and tides reached 15 feet above normal. took time to assemble the train, get a creq and at least two hours to fire up the boilers and get enough steam to get the train moving.
Officially, 408 people lost their lives as a result of the storm, including over 250 veterans, but the death toll may have actually been much higher. Following the storm, the Florida East Coast railroad was abandoned, but the Overseas Highway would everntually be completed and still stands today as one of the most beautiful drives in the world.
