The storm’s outer circulation reached the Keys corridor and began the work that the eye wall would complete.
The northeast wind — the quadrant of the storm’s rotation that preceded the eye wall’s arrival from the southeast — drove the shallow water of Florida Bay toward the western shores of the island chain. The bay was responsive to wind forcing in a way that the deep Atlantic was not. Five to six feet of average depth across the basin meant that a sustained wind of even moderate force could pile the water against the leeward shore, raising the level by feet in the space of hours. The northeast wind was not moderate. It was sustained at hurricane force by late afternoon and increasing toward the velocity the eye wall would deliver. The bay responded as the physics demanded: the water moved.
The bay surge arrived at the Keys’ western shores before the ocean surge arrived at the eastern shores.
The bay side arrived first, just as the Observer had expected from the wind and the shallower water to the west.
The embankment held.
The water rose against it.
* * *
On the eastern side of the islands the Atlantic was building a different kind of surge.
The ocean swells — the long-period waves generated by the eye wall’s southeast winds propagating outward from the storm’s center across hundreds of miles of open Atlantic fetch — had been arriving at the Keys’ eastern shore since mid-afternoon. The swells were not yet the storm surge itself. They were the precursors — the advance signal of the energy that the eye wall’s direct passage would deliver when it reached the corridor. But the swells were building in height and shortening in period as the eye wall closed on the Keys, and the combined effect of the swells and the wind-driven rise in water level was already pushing the Atlantic past its normal boundaries on the eastern shore.
The water came from both sides.
On islands a quarter mile wide, the water from the west and the water from the east approached each other across a distance too small to keep them separated. The railroad embankment, running northeast to southwest along the spine of the island chain, served as the last barrier between the two surges on those islands where it stood between the bay and the ocean. On islands where the embankment ran parallel to the surge rather than perpendicular to it — where the track followed the island’s long axis rather than crossing it — the water from both sides met without obstruction.
The first water was not the killing water. The killing water would arrive with the eye wall’s back passage, when the wind reversed to the south-southwest and the full Atlantic surge crossed the islands in a single violent inundation. The first water was the preparation — the bay surge that saturated the ground, flooded the roads, surrounded the structures, and eliminated every option for movement that the camps’ occupants might have used to reach higher ground or stronger shelter.
There was no higher ground. The highest natural feature on the Matecumbe Keys was the coral ridge at eight feet above sea level. The railroad embankment exceeded it. Everything else — the camp structures, the road surface, the cleared ground where the veterans lived and worked — was at five to six feet. The first water covered it.
* * *
The camp structures began to fail in the sequence the wind dictated.
The weakest went first — the canvas-and-timber shelters that had been built for temporary seasonal use, not for the sustained application of hurricane-force wind. The canvas tore. The timber framing folded. The roofing material — tarpaper, corrugated metal, the lightweight covering that the FERA budget had provided — peeled from the structures in sheets that the wind accelerated to lethal velocity. Each piece of roofing became a projectile. Each structural failure released more projectiles. The debris field above the islands thickened with every structure that failed, and the failing structures failed faster as the wind increased and the water weakened the foundations that held them to the coral ground.
The veterans who had been sheltering in these structures found themselves in the open.
The open, on the Matecumbe Keys at eight o’clock in the evening of September 2, 1935, was a landscape of water and wind and airborne debris that offered no shelter, no protection, and no direction of escape. The water was waist-deep and rising. The wind was at sustained hurricane force and gusting beyond any measurement the human body could meaningfully distinguish — the difference between a hundred miles per hour and a hundred and twenty miles per hour was academic to a man standing in water with no shelter, both being sufficient to knock him down and hold him down and drive into his exposed skin the sand and shell and coral fragments that the wind was scouring from the islands’ surfaces.
The men who reached the railroad embankment pressed against its leeward side and held on.
The men who reached the stronger structures — the concrete buildings, the camp headquarters, the few permanent Keys structures in the vicinity that had been built by the year-round residents with hurricane experience — crowded inside and listened to the wind test the integrity of walls and roofs that were better than what the camps had offered but that had not been designed for this.
The men who reached neither the embankment nor a strong structure were in the water.
The storm’s outer circulation had delivered the first water. It had saturated the corridor. It had destroyed the weakest structures. It had dispersed the population from their shelters into the open landscape of the islands.
The eye wall was twenty minutes away.
The ocean surge was building behind it.
The corridor was ready.