Okeechobee

On September 17, 1928, a hurricane hit Lake Okeechobee Florida drowning approximately 1,800-2500 people. The hurricane was the background for Zora Neale Hurston's novel 'Their Eyes were Watching God'. An excerpt from the article:

"Okeechobee Hurricane



In September, 1928, only about 50,000 persons lived in South Florida. The land and real estate boom was already beginning to fade, although many subdivisions and new communities were still being built. The devastating Great Miami Hurricane of September, 1926, had already sounded a loud alarm to the new residents about the vulnerability of their new homes to tropical cyclones. However, most of the damage from that storm was in Dade and Broward counties. Even so, a bellwether of what was to come occurred with the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 as flood waters from Lake Okeechobee were swept by that storm into Moore Haven, the county seat of Glades County, killing over 100 people.


The City of Palm Beach, founded only 34 years earlier by Henry Flagler, was incorporated in 1911 and had become a playground for the rich and famous, while West Palm Beach grew up on the opposite side of Lake Worth as a place where the support staff lived. The Atlantic breezes were balmy and the climate was warm. On the opposite side of the county, a quite different situation was emerging. The rich, black muck soil near Lake Okeechobee was already being utilized for its tremendous agricultural productivity. The newly incorporated town of Belle Glade was growing steadily, fueled by the rapidly expanding agriculture in fields nearby. A rural, agrarian society, dependent on migrant labor, was plowing and harvesting along the shores of the lake behind a hastily built muck levee.
Only two years after the Great Miami Hurricane, what would become the second category 4 (Saffir-Simpson scale) hurricane to strike South Florida in as many years formed off the coast of Africa in early September. It churned across the Atlantic, and devastated the island of Guadeloupe on September 12, moved through the Virgin Islands, and struck a direct hit on Puerto Rico on the 13th, El Día de San Felipe. More than 300 persons were killed by this storm in Puerto Rico, and it is known as the San Felipe II Hurricane because of the day on which it struck. To some extent, the devastation in Puerto Rico provided some warning to residents of Florida’s east coast. It moved through the Bahama Islands on September 14-15, and on Sunday evening around 615 PM, September 16, the hurricane made landfall in the United States in Palm Beach County between Jupiter and Boca Raton."