Labor Day Hurricane
What we’re talking about
On September 2, 1935, a disaster was unfolding in the Florida Keys as a category 5 hurricane with winds estimated near 185 mph made landfall on Long Key in Monroe County. As the storm’s center moved on shore, the barometric pressure was recorded at 892 millibars, the lowest on record in the U.S. The storm devastated the Keys and killed hundreds, including over 250 WWI veterans who were helping to build a new railroad across the Keys.
The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 remains the strongest on record to ever strike the United States with an estimated pressure of 982 millibars and winds over 185 miles per hour. The storm killed over 400 as it swept across the Florida Keys on Labor Day in 1935. Dr. Steve Lyons says we need a new way to classify the threats of hurricanes and hopes NOAA will retire the Saffir Simpson rating scale and instead use a threat scale based on each individual storm.
Transcript
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Eighty-five years ago this week, just days before Labor Day, the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression. The country was suffering from the Dust Bowl, and it was six years away from entering World War II. In the Florida Keys, the weather was nice.
There was word of a tropical storm brewing and moving through the Bahamas. Headed towards South Florida, unfortunately no one knew it was going to be the strongest hurricane on record to strike the U.S. It would be remembered as the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. This is the Disaster Recovery Roundtable, a platform to explore, engage, and educate the emergency management community.
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Our topics are timely and relevant, intended to promote the exchange of ideas and best practices. Now, here’s your host, Greg Padgett. And thank you, Steve Henderson, and happy Labor Day.
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Unfortunately, 85 years ago, there was no beach day in the Florida Keys. A catastrophic event was unfolding. A Category 5 hurricane, the strongest in recorded history to strike the U.S., was making landfall in the upper Florida Keys.
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Although a small storm, its intensity was unmatched. It still holds the record for the lowest recorded pressure at landfall, around 892 millibars. With winds estimated at 185 miles per hour or greater, it produced a fatal storm surge of at least 20 feet.
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Our guest in this episode has spent years studying that hurricane and its historical significance in the U.S. Dr. Steve Lyons was the Chief of the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch of the National Hurricane Center from 1994 to 1998, and also served as the Weather Channel’s Hurricane Expert from 1998 to 2010. He’s a recipient of the prestigious Neil Frank Award from the National Hurricane Conference, and most recently retired from his role as meteorologist in charge for the San Angelo, Texas, Office of the National Weather Service. Welcome to Disaster Recovery Roundtable, Dr. Lyons.
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Thanks for inviting me, Greg. Really appreciate it. Tell us why this particular storm is still just a history maker in the books.
(2:07 – 2:22)
Well, part of it, it was a surprise. Part of it was the fact that it fell at a very bad time in American history. And from a meteorological standpoint, it’s still the lowest pressure ever measured in the United States of America at 892 millibars.
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It was at Category 5, and in my opinion, probably the strongest hurricane on record that’s hit the U.S. That’s pretty amazing when you think about Michael and some of the most recent impacts. Of course, there’s always Andrew there in South Florida as well. I understand this particular storm, of course, it was the 30s.
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And so forecasting back then was totally different than it is today. But they did have some kind of inclination that there was a system out there and there was something coming towards Florida? Yeah. Back then, it was ships, land surface stations, and meteorological ingenuity as best they knew it back then.
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There was no reconnaissance aircraft flying into anything. There was no radar. There were no numerical weather prediction models.
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The communications were pretty much by either telegraph or radio. Radio was a major communication back then. There was no television.
It was widespread. So they were basically monitoring the circulation based on surrounding observations. And unfortunately, it was very small.
It was sort of stealth. It was sort of like a weak tropical storm that was moving through the Bahamas, that they got that information late. And also through the Cuban Meteorological Service.
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And then that thing just bottomed out right after it hit Andrews Island. It went from probably a weak Category 1 to a Category 5 and hit the Keys. All in one fell swoop within 24 hours.
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You know, it’s kind of ironic today. We’re still dealing with the challenges of rapid intensification for storms, as we saw recently with Hurricane Laura in the Gulf Coast. And I think, you know, Katrina went through that at one point as well.
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And others, Michael, went through that. Those seem to be the most impactful hurricanes that we have because of the fact that the public is not prepared as much as they might be. Because it’s a weaker storm.
And then in the next day, it’s a much more dangerous storm. Most major hurricanes get there because they rapidly intensify from a Category 1 within 24 hours. And sometimes it’s from a Category 2 to a Category 5. And if you’re close to land, watch out.
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And especially back in 1935, where it was just a horrible situation. You know, the Great Depression was in full swing. The stock market had crashed just a few months earlier.
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Nobody was visiting the Keys in South Florida. The heyday of the Roaring Twenties was over. So there was a big depression.
People were in dire straits already. There were soup lines and everything. There was political upheaval.
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FDR had just gotten into office and promised his New Deal. And he had sent World War I veterans down to the Keys to help rebuild and fix the overseas railroad there. And I think they had something like 684 vets that they had sent down there.
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Fortunately, it was Labor Day, so about 300 of them had left the Keys. And that left about 384 of them still down there. And they were supposed to be picked up by the train itself well before any hurricane event.
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And it was a fiasco. It turns out it was a Labor Day. Nobody wanted to go down there.
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And so the train was greatly delayed. The communications to Washington to make the train go down there and pick them up was delayed. Finally, they basically made a makeshift group of people that was sort of like a voluntary railroad.
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Unfortunately, by the time they got that railroad train down there with the volunteers, they passed the people that were waiting to be picked up, backed up, and were right in the middle of a hurricane. And a giant wall of water with a storm surge, as we call it, came across the island and completely washed the train off the tracks. The only thing that stayed on the tracks was the locomotive.
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Believe it or not, a couple of the train volunteers managed to survive by holding on to that train track. So it was just a harrowing experience, just a calamity of errors. And I’ve heard you say that the Keys are not really susceptible for the most part to a big storm surge event.
(6:42 – 7:03)
However, this storm, I guess, was somewhat unique in the fact that it just brought in a huge wall of water with it as it came into the islands. Yeah, most of the people that survived said it was first tremendous winds, and then all of a sudden a huge wall of water swept through across the Keys. And then the wind after it was tremendous as well.
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And yeah, the Keys are not as susceptible as, say, New Orleans or Tampa to real high surge. And this hurricane was not all that big. The eye was only eight miles wide, a smaller eye than Hurricane Andrew, and the pressure was a full 30 millibars lower than Hurricane Andrew.
(7:22 – 7:45)
So it was just a tremendous event that came through there. After the event, when Hemingway was down in Key West, which wasn’t affected, he actually helped find about 70 bodies that were mangled around in trees and hanging up in trees 25 feet in the air. The wind was so strong that it basically defaced people.
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They were unrecognizable in their faces. Their clothes had been blown off of them. The only thing left on them were belts and shoes with people with no faces.
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He said it was just despicable what had happened to the people. So it was just very distraught by the whole event. And this came 35 years or so after the Great Galveston Hurricane, which also was a huge loss, much, much larger than what happened there in the Keys.
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You would think that the United States at that point would have been trying to identify better opportunities to forecast these storms. And I guess maybe it was just, you know, they had the best what they could work with at that particular time. Yeah, the problem was, is they only had surface observations and ships.
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And, of course, what do ships do when they’re around stronger winds? If they know anything, they’ll sort it away from the strong winds. So we rarely knew how strong anything was or exactly where it was. And this one was, you know, an eight-mile wide eye.
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You’re not going to find that. And, of course, it didn’t have an eye when it was over the Bahamas. So we couldn’t see it.
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There was no such thing as satellite imagery back then. So it was just very crude. And it turns out there was a 1919 hurricane that ran through the Keys that was very strong as well.
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So they knew that they were vulnerable, but they had all these workers down there in the heart of hurricane season. And their idea was that they’d zoom a train down there and pick them up and evacuate them, so to speak. And it happened to fall on Labor Day, and nobody wanted to go down there.
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They didn’t think much of these World War II vets anyway. They were on this New Deal plan to fix stuff, and nobody liked them. And the rest is just history.
(9:30 – 9:47)
It was just very tragic and just a monster of a hurricane from the standpoint of wind. My guess is it was at least 175 and probably close to 200-mile-an-hour sustained winds. The surge that hit there is estimated to be 17 feet at least, and that’s probably conservative.
(9:48 – 10:02)
Some people reviewed the area. They found that there were live conches up on the Keys on high ground. And stingrays were up there, dead, lying in the sun, decaying, along with the bodies that were left behind as well.
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So the whole Ocean floor was just basically swept up over the top of the Keys. And the survivors miraculously were able to cling to palm trees, you know, up in palm trees. The water lifted them up, and they just held on.
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And some of them were in some of the more sturdy hurricane houses that have been built on high ground. Most of them were destroyed, but some of them still survived. People were impaled by objects down there in the Keys when they found them.
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And by the time they got to the rescue, they’d take the impaled object out of them, and they immediately died. I mean, it was just a horrendous situation. You’re listening to our special coverage of Hurricane Season 2020.
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Now, back to this episode of Disaster Recovery Roundtable. Now, think about that with the storm surge there, just how high it was. And we heard with Laura from the Hurricane Center, or used to work as well, unsurvivable storm surge.
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And that has, from my recollection, never been part of an official forecast from the Hurricane Center. Do you think it was just one of those situations where they just really wanted to get people out because they were just so worried that it was going to be some historical event that was going to take place there along the coast of Louisiana? Well, part of it is that the hurricane strength is not directly tied to the surge height. It also depends on where it hits.
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Some areas are much more vulnerable. The surge can be three times as high as other areas for the exact identical hurricane. And number two, it’s the angle of attack to the coast.
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The one that’s moving straight on shore is the most dangerous. How fast it moves on shore is important. Moving at about 18 miles an hour is the peak surge for any given hurricane.
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And the other thing is the size. If it’s very small, it doesn’t allow the water to pile up like it would in a very large hurricane. So if it’s a really big Cat 3, that’s far more dangerous than a tiny Cat 5 from the standpoint of a hurricane surge, say, in Mississippi or Louisiana, like we saw in Hurricane Katrina.
(12:16 – 12:37)
They couldn’t figure out how could the surge be so big, you know? It’s only a Cat 3, and it was 27 feet, the highest ever measured in North America. And that’s because it was so large. So if you don’t include all those things in there, you can’t just look at a Saffir-Simpson scale and assume that surge category that used to be tied to it.
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They took it off of there after Hurricane Katrina because it was not – I knew it was never valid. It was just a guesstimate, you know, but it’s very – and so Louisiana is very vulnerable to surge. They knew it’s low line, so if you’re trapped there, even a 5-foot surge will wash you away.
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You don’t need a 25-foot surge. You’re not going to swim against it. It’s going to sweep over a barrier island or a key like in Key West, and you’re at the mercy of the water.
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And water is what kills. Most people can hide from wind if it’s not too strong and the structure survives. And nowadays, in Miami anyway, a lot of the structures, even in a Cat 5, the roof will blow off, but you can tower and hide somewhere.
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But the water, forget it. Waves and surge are deadly. Wind can be deadly as well.
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You know, if you’re in a mobile home or a poorly built structure or in a high rise with windows, good luck. But not nearly as bad as water. And most of the people in this one, 408 is the guesstimate.
(13:45 – 14:05)
A lot of people probably never were counted and never knew they were there. And it was one of the deadliest in the top five for a long time, this Labor Day hurricane. Nowadays, the population has grown so much that, you know, we have much bigger catastrophes, internationally and nationally, if they hit.
(14:05 – 14:31)
Your career also took you to the Weather Channel as the hurricane specialist there. And I think, you know, while you were there, you told me that you were pushing this theory that we really need to have a different classification system for tropical events, because a weak tropical storm can be just as deadly and impactful to a community if it’s a flood event, compared to a Cat 2 hurricane that comes through really quickly and goes up and goes on up. And it’s not around that community very long.
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What kind of work did you do with that? And I think you even had some opportunities to share with officials up in D.C., some of your recommendations for how we should classify hurricanes moving forward. Well, the way you look at it is every hurricane has a footprint and has five toes to that footprint. Wind is the toe that everybody thinks about.
(14:56 – 15:06)
A surge, a water rise is another toe. Waves are a big toe, and people forget about that. They can completely knock down high-rise buildings, as we saw in Hurricane Opal.
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And then, of course, we have the flooding rains and the baby tower tornadoes. So those five elements can occur, and depending on the hurricane, how fast it’s moving, the size, the intensity, where it hits, any one of those toes can be the dominant damage factor. And it turns out that each toe is unique.
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The wind speed has nothing to do with flooding rain. For example, in Hurricane Harvey, it hit us a Cat 4 and destroyed Rockport with wind. The surge didn’t hit it because the winds were offshore, but it was wind there in Rockport.
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By the time I got to Houston, it was not even a Category 1. It was a tropical storm, but the flooding rain destroyed the area and caused billions of dollars in damage. So you have to look at each of those five toes separately. You can’t look at them as one single category of storm.
(15:59 – 16:21)
That only works for the wind speed for the San Francisco scale, and it does only poorly because within the category can be much bigger difference in damage than from one category to the next. If you’re at the high end of Cat 3, you know, so, or going from Cat 1, strong Cat 1 to Cat 2, you’re only changing five knots. But if you go all the way to the top end of Cat 2, it’s far worse damage.
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So even that doesn’t work. It’s a continuous scale. So I tried to show each of the five toes of the footprint and which toe was going to be the one that watch out for this one in this area.
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And in some cases, even for the same hurricane, you can have a different toe affect differently for different areas. In other words, it can be flooding rain inland and it can be high wind at the coast or it can be surge in another area for the same hurricane. And so we tend to just blanket them all together and run down the coast and say, oh, look at the wind.
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And it doesn’t it doesn’t protect people that way. Yeah, 69 Camille is a good example of that horrific winds along the coast and then a big flood event in Virginia and parts of the northeast from from just a dumping of rain in a very short amount of time. Yeah.
And surprisingly, even though the Cat 5 had the biggest surge in landfill right on a very vulnerable coast, the greatest number of deaths were the flooding rains in New England and Pennsylvania and Virginia. So you can have very far field deadly events from a tropical storm or a hurricane, regardless of its intensity, when it interacts with other features, other weather features as well. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that this season, although still active, hopefully won’t produce any more big monster storms or any more devastating storms for any communities around here.
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We can’t leave this podcast without mentioning the fact that you’re ending a long career with the National Weather Service decades. So I won’t make you sound too old, but decades of service. You recently were the the M.I.C., the meteorologist in charge for the San Angelo, Texas National Weather Service office.
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What’s going to be your look back on your career? What’s your greatest achievement? I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had a lot of different jobs. I worked at the Geophysical Flood Dynamics Lab at Princeton as a climate modeler.
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I worked as a Navy as an applied research scientist. I was a professor. I worked at the Hurricane Center.
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I worked on television. Not too many people get the opportunity to do all the things that came my way. So when I look back, I think myself is very fortunate to have been able to do a lot of different things.
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And I’m still doing consulting in my recent retirement with Forensic Meteorology. So that’s a new thing that I can do from home as well. And things like this as well.
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Before we go, I also want to add that you are the prior recipient of the Neil Frank Award. And we all know the great things that Neil Frank did for hurricanes out there in our community, of course, and in just the history of the Hurricane Center and the work there. And so that must be a great award to have as well from from your years of service.
(19:04 – 19:22)
So I want to congratulate you again on that particular feat for your career. And just say thank you so much for being part of this podcast. Again, it’s Labor Day.
A lot of folks are hopefully enjoying some time with their family safely. And in this unusual year we’re having in 2020, but don’t forget to look out there and watch the tropics. You never know when that next big storm is going to come up.
(19:22 – 19:27)
Thank you so much for being part of the show today. Thanks for inviting me, Greg. Really appreciate it.
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