* * * DISTURBANCE APPARENTLY APPROACHING WESTERN CUBA FROM THE CARIBBEAN SEA. UNSAFE FOR VESSELS NEXT FEW DAYS OFF WESTERN CUBA, FLORIDA AND SOUTH ATLANTIC COASTS.
With this message on the morning of Wednesday, October 17, 1906, the U.S. Weather Bureau ordered storm warnings be flown along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Newspapers carried dramatic accounts of damage in Nicaragua from a major hurricane nearly ten days before. Even the meteorologists did not make the connection. The eighth tropical cyclone of that year had meandered all over the western Caribbean and Central America. At noon on the 17th, it was south of Cuba and had become a major hurricane with top winds of 120 mph.
Telegraph reports from Havana that night were not encouraging as the center passed near there just before midnight. Weather conditions were already deteriorating in the Florida Keys. Henry Morrison Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway was about a year into an adventurous project to build his railroad over the ocean to Key West. Men were working from boats to hack through the mangrove forests and build the base for the bridges with rock and fill. Those men tied up the huge houseboats on which they slept as the weather worsened that night.
By 8 a.m. on the 18th, the men on Houseboat #4, tied up at Long Key found themselves in dire straits. The high winds and heavy seas jostled the boat snapping the huge iron chains that bound it to the pilings like they were mere threads. The boat and its 150 men were adrift in the open ocean, even as the huge 60 foot waves battered it to pieces. The men were hurled into the sea to hang onto anything they could find. Over half of the men on Houseboat #4 were never found.
The small but powerful hurricane roared across the Keys that morning. Its damage path was less than 70 miles wide. Winds were measured to 72 mph at Sandy Key and 77 mph at Key West. Reports from the telegraph office in Miami reported two feet of water in the building.
A total of 193 people died in the hurricane, most of them workers from the Florida East Coast Railway.
