South of the Gulf of Tehuantepec, a tropical cyclone formed on August 17. The storm caused gales, and a ship reported a pressure reading of 29.61 inHg (100.3 kPa). It generally moved west-northwest, and was last seen August 9. On August 5, a tropical cyclone formed just off the coast of Mexico. Systems Tropical Storm One Ī tropical storm caused gales in Manzanillo on July 1. This season saw three tropical cyclones and ended early in August. Most east Pacific storms were of no threat to land. Before the satellite age started in the 1960s, data on east Pacific hurricanes was extremely unreliable. The 1935 Pacific hurricane season ran through the summer and fall of 1935. 1930s North Indian Ocean cyclone seasons. ![]() The sea ripped the Albury house off its foundation, setting it afloat and drifting until it struck the raised railroad embankment, where U.S. A massive storm surge swept across the islands, knocking tracks off a railroad viaduct 30 feet above sea level. The barometer dropped to 892 millibars - it’s still the only storm to make landfall below 900 millibars in the Western Hemisphere - and gusts hit an estimated 200 mph. In the next hours, the stormed reached record intensity. Seemingly out of nowhere, rain pelted the car. That morning, he tagged along with his dad on a drive in the family’s Model A. “That was the scary part of the whole thing.” “Nobody knew,” said Everett Albury, who was six at the time and living in Tavernier, where the Driftwood Trailer Park now sits. advisory, Knowles reported, had the storm making a slow westerly trek 200 miles due east of Havana with “shifting gales and probably winds near hurricane force over a small area.” When Labor Day 1935 arrived windy in the upper Keys, it gave little hint of what was to come. At 10 a.m., a Pan Am plane making a run from Key West to Havana spotted storm clouds far north of where the storm should have been.Īn American barnstormer in Cuba training pilots volunteered to check out the storm and got close enough to provide an ominous warning: The storm looked to be churning straight for the ribbon of islands unfurling from the Florida mainland. But when Monday arrived, there were no squalls, no radical drop in barometric pressure. They predicted it would strike Cuba on Labor Day four days later. 29, meteorologists in San Juan first detected the brewing storm east of the island. Advisories and warnings came from faraway Washington and forecasters frequently grappled with what Dorst called the “lost hurricane problem” when ships fled and information dried up. Forecasters relied on barometers, telegraph cables and “an awful lot on ships at seas,” said Neal Dorst, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist and historian. Long before radar and televisions and satellites, predicting hurricanes was a hit-and-miss science. history, except Camille in Mississippi in 1969, the storm caused five times as many deaths as Camille. It was the highest tidal surge in Florida history. (Normal barometric pressure is 30.) A tidal surge 50 miles wide and 18 feet high, with 10-foot waves breaking on top, scoured the islands for an hour. A sucking pressure made men feel as if their heads were about to explode, plunging barometers to the lowest reading - 26.35 - ever recorded by the U.S. Then “hell in the form of a hurricane” came ashore in Islamorada at 8 p.m., in screaming blackness, with 250 miles per hour winds that twisted steel, the strongest hurricane winds ever in the United States. “It was,” a newspaper concluded, “a fine day to catch up with the reading.” ![]() It was no day for business or recreation, folks said. Labor marched, an “inspirational sight,” in wind and rain in downtown Miami. Labor chiefs hailed FDR’s “new social and economic order.” Swimmer Buster Crabbe was featured in smoking ads, saying, “Camels Don’t Get Your Wind.” Forlorn lover Margie Stanley, 35, crying, “I have fallen in love with the wrong man,” swallowed a fatal dose of poison in a Miami hotel room. G-Men were experimenting with a strange new invention, the lie-detector machine. On the Monday that the storm hit, a paroled Sing Sing jewel thief was arrested in The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. Conchs who had confidently weathered hurricanes in 1894, 19 found themselves “at the mercy of the Lord,” as one said. The Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 decimated the 400 pioneer families who struggled to make a living on the 18-mile ribbon of coral islands that are the Upper Keys. No one could know that the “little storm” that swirled listlessly off the Bahamas 30 hours earlier would crush the Depression-weary fishing towns of Islamorada and Tavernier as the fiercest hurricane ever to land in the Western World.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |