Labor Day fell on September 2 in 1935, and the holiday accomplished what no natural barrier could: it slowed the human response to a crawl while the storm accelerated.
The federal calendar ignored meteorological realities. It did not account for the coincidence of a national holiday with the peak weeks of the Atlantic hurricane season. It did not adjust its schedule for the possibility that the administrative chain of command responsible for seven hundred men on exposed coral islands might need to function at full capacity on a day when the government had given itself permission to rest. The holiday was the holiday. The offices in Jacksonville and Miami and Washington operated at reduced staff. The decision-makers who would need to authorize an evacuation were dispersed — some at home, some at recreational events, some traveling, some reachable by telephone and some not.
Fred Ghent was serving as superintendent of the relief camps.
That fact would later become a point of both defense and accusation in the investigation that followed. Ghent had traveled to the Keys over the weekend — the FERA administrator visiting the camps under his jurisdiction, a routine administrative trip that placed him, on the morning of September 2, closer to the threatened population than his Jacksonville office would have allowed. Ghent was on the ground. He could see the weather. He could feel the barometer falling. He could hear the wind beginning to work the palm fronds and the loose construction materials at the highway work sites.
What Ghent could not do, from the Keys, was dispatch the train. The train was in Miami. The railroad’s dispatcher was in Miami. The authority to assemble a special train — to locate a locomotive, gather passenger cars, assign a crew, and send them south on the Keys extension — resided with the railroad, and the railroad required a formal request. The request had to come from FERA. The request had to specify the urgency. The railroad had to weigh the urgency against the conditions — was it safe to send a train south into deteriorating weather? Was the track still clear? Were the bridges passable?
The holiday slowed every step of this sequence.
* * *
The Weather Bureau advisory issued during the early morning hours of September 2 described a hurricane of considerable intensity south-southeast of the Florida Keys, moving in a general westerly to northwesterly direction.
The advisory’s language was calibrated to the Bureau’s institutional standard: professional, cautionary, measured. It recommended that precautions be taken in the Keys and along the South Florida coast. It did not use the word unprecedented. It did not describe the rate of intensification that the storm had undergone during its crossing of the Gulf Stream, because the Bureau did not possess observations from the storm’s core and could not measure what it could not observe. The advisory described the storm as it appeared from the periphery — from the ship reports and coastal observations that constituted the Bureau’s data network in 1935 — and what appeared from the periphery was a dangerous hurricane moving toward the Keys.
The advisory reached the Keys communities through the channels available: radio, telegraph, telephone where the lines were functioning. The year-round residents of the Upper Keys — the fishing families, the small-business operators, the people who had lived through the 1926 storm’s passage and who maintained the seasonal awareness that decades of residency produced — heard the advisory and began their preparations. Windows were boarded. Boats were secured. Some families made the decision to leave, loading their vehicles and heading north on the partially completed highway toward the mainland.
The veterans heard the advisory through the camp administration. Sheldon received the information and communicated it to the camp foremen. The information was general: a hurricane was approaching. Preparations should be made. What preparations meant, in the context of the camps, was limited by the structures and the geography. The barracks could not be made hurricane-proof. The islands could not be elevated. The men could be moved to the strongest available structures — the concrete-and-steel bridge pilings, the few permanent buildings in the nearby communities — but the strongest available structures on the Matecumbe Keys were not designed for hurricane conditions and were not located at elevations that would be above a major storm surge.
The only meaningful preparation was evacuation.
Evacuation required the train.
* * *
Through the morning and early afternoon of September 2, the conditions on the Keys deteriorated steadily.
The barometer fell. The wind shifted from northeast to north, building seas on the Florida Bay side of the islands. The sky lowered. The outer rain bands of the approaching system began to sweep across the island chain in squalls that came and went with increasing frequency and intensity, each squall stronger than the last, the intervals between them shorter. The locals who had seen hurricanes before recognized the progression. The veterans, who had not, experienced the deterioration as weather rather than as warning — rain and wind, uncomfortable but not yet frightening, the kind of conditions a man from the northern states might associate with a severe thunderstorm rather than with the leading edge of the most intense hurricane in the recorded history of the United States.
By early afternoon the conditions had advanced beyond uncomfortable.
The wind was sustained at tropical storm force. The rain was horizontal in the stronger gusts. The water in Florida Bay was rising visibly against the western shores of the islands, pushed by the north wind across the shallow basin. The road connecting the Matecumbe Keys to the mainland was beginning to flood at the low points where the highway grade crossed the causeway approaches. The railroad track, running at its embankment height, was still above water, but the approaches to some of the bridge crossings were showing surge on the windward side.
Sheldon contacted Ghent. The exchange — its exact content and timing would become a subject of the investigation — resulted in a decision to request the evacuation train. The request was placed to the Florida East Coast Railway at approximately 2:00 PM on September 2.
The storm had been intensifying over the Gulf Stream for approximately eighteen hours. It was now a powerful and still-intensifying hurricane, its central pressure below 940 millibars, its barometric descent accelerating with every advisory interval. Twelve hours from landfall. The train had not yet been assembled.
* * *
Two o’clock on a holiday afternoon.
The railroad’s Miami yards were operating at holiday capacity, which was to say at minimal capacity. The dispatcher received the request and began the process of assembling the special train. A locomotive had to be located and made ready. Passenger cars had to be gathered from the yards and coupled together. A crew had to be assembled — an engineer, a fireman, a conductor, the trainmen required to manage a passenger consist on a single-track line in deteriorating weather.
The assembly took time. Not an extraordinary amount of time by the railroad’s normal standards — special trains were assembled periodically for various purposes, and the process was routine — but time nonetheless. The holiday contributed its own delays. Crew members had to be contacted and recalled. Equipment had to be inspected. The consist had to be arranged in the correct order for the single-track operation that the Keys extension required.
Outside the yards, the weather continued to deteriorate. The wind in Miami was gusting to storm force. The rain was heavy and intermittent. The conditions were not yet dangerous in Miami — the storm’s center was still far to the south, and Miami was on the periphery of the wind field — but they were degrading the operational environment in which the railroad had to prepare and dispatch the train.
The clock ran.
The storm did not observe the holiday.
It did not wait for the railroad to assemble its train or for the dispatcher to clear the track or for the crew to report for duty. It continued its intensification over the Gulf Stream with the same patient, relentless efficiency it had maintained since the Bahamas crossing, the pressure falling, the eye contracting, the maximum winds tightening into the compact ring of destruction that would, in a matter of hours, produce the most intense conditions the Record had ever measured at a Florida landfall.
The gap between the institutional timeline and the meteorological timeline — the gap the Council had noted in Chapter 6 — was widening with every hour that passed.
The train was being assembled.
The storm was already built.