The Storm Council

The Storm Council

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Labor Day 1935 — The Last Train to the Keys
In September 1935, a hurricane of unprecedented intensity struck the Florida Keys and destroyed the Overseas Railroad, killing hundreds of World War I…
Chapter 39 - The Labor Day Storm
The Council reviewed the entry one last time before naming it.
Chapter 38 - 892 Millibars
The Archivist then filed the storm’s vital statistics against the full American record.
Chapter 37 - The Railroad
The Florida East Coast Railway announced in September 1935 that it would not rebuild the Overseas Railroad.
Chapter 36 - The Inquiry
The investigation followed the same chain the Analyst had been tracking since the storm was still east of the Bahamas and arrived at the same hard fact…
Chapter 35 - What the Corridor Held
In debrief, the Council found that the corridor had revealed more than any single earlier Florida entry.
Chapter 34 - Who Murdered the Vets?
Ernest Hemingway came to the Keys by boat from Key West and found a landscape that answered a question before it was asked.
Chapter 33 - The Cremation
The heat forced the decision.
Chapter 32 - The Accounting
The count came in pieces, like the wreckage.
Chapter 31 - First Light
First light over the Upper Keys on Tuesday, September 3, 1935, revealed a geography that did not match the geography that had existed twenty-four hours…
Chapter 30 - The Back Wall
The storm continued its passage northwest across the Keys and into the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, and what it left behind in the corridor was the…
Chapter 29 - Long Key
J. E. Duane survived the back eye wall by holding on to what the water gave him.
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