The back eye wall arrived from the south-southwest and brought the ocean with it.
The wind reversed. Where the first passage had driven the air from the northeast — pushing Florida Bay water across the Keys from the bay side, building the surge against the western face of the railroad embankment — the back passage drove the air from the south-southwest, pushing the Atlantic across the Keys from the ocean side. The reversal was not gradual. The wind built from calm to hurricane force in the space of minutes as the back eye wall’s inner edge crossed the corridor, and the ocean responded with a surge that arrived at the Keys’ southern and eastern shores with a violence that exceeded what the first passage had delivered from the bay side.
The Atlantic surge was the deeper surge. The bay was shallow and its surge, while destructive, was limited by the volume of water the shallow basin contained. The Atlantic was deep and its fetch was unlimited — hundreds of miles of open ocean over which the eye wall’s winds had been building the surge for the full duration of the storm’s approach. The water that arrived at the Keys from the south-southwest after the eye passed was not the bay-side surge that had risen slowly across the islands in the first half. It was a rapid, massive inundation that Duane, at Long Key, recorded in his log as “walls of water.”
The description was not metaphorical.
The surge came in distinct pulses — waves of water riding on top of the general rise in sea level, each pulse higher than the last, the breaking crests of the waves adding a vertical dimension to the surge that made the inundation appear as a series of advancing walls rather than a gradual rise. The first pulse crossed the islands at the level the first passage had established — waist-deep, covering the roads, surrounding the structures. The second pulse exceeded that level by feet. The third pulse covered the railroad embankment.
The embankment’s overtopping from the ocean side completed the hydraulic sequence the Council had calculated. In the first half, the bay surge had piled against the embankment’s western face and overtopped it from west to east, pouring down the eastern slope in a concentrated weir flow. In the second half, the ocean surge overtopped the embankment from east to west, pouring down the western slope with equal violence. The embankment had been designed to carry trains. It had served, in the storm’s first passage, as a dam and a weir. In the second passage, it served the same function in reverse. The scour zones on both sides of the embankment — the ground where the concentrated overtopping flow had torn away the surface material and everything upon it — expanded with each pulse of the surge.
The camp structures that had survived the first passage — those with concrete foundations, those that had been anchored more securely, those that by fortune of position had been partially sheltered by the embankment or by other structures during the northeast wind — now faced the south-southwest wind from the direction they had not been tested against. Structures that had survived facing the storm survived because their strongest face happened to be oriented toward the wind. The back wall tested the opposite face. The structures failed.
* * *
The surge and the wind operated together with a destructive efficiency the Record measured as the highest in the Florida archive.
The wind stripped the structures. The surge carried away what the wind had stripped. The wind drove the debris — and the people — through the water at velocities that made every impact lethal. The surge deposited the debris — and the people — against whatever obstruction the water’s flow encountered: the railroad embankment, the mangrove stands on the bay side, the bridge abutments, the coral ridges that rose a few feet above the general island surface.
The corridor between Lower Matecumbe and Tavernier received the back eye wall’s full passage.
Twelve miles of narrow coral islands at five to eight feet above sea level, subjected to a storm surge of ten to eighteen feet driven by winds of 160 knots, from two directions in the space of three hours. The built environment within this corridor — every structure, every vehicle, every piece of equipment, every section of railroad track and roadbed not anchored to the coral foundation by concrete or steel — was removed. The word the survivors would use in the aftermath was “clean.” The islands were washed clean. The twelve-mile corridor was scoured to its coral base, the surfaces of the islands bearing no evidence that human habitation had ever existed upon them except for the foundations and the fragments of infrastructure too heavy for the water to carry.
The Archivist set the destruction against the earlier Florida entries.
Galveston’s damage had been concentrated on the Gulf-facing side of the island, where the surge had carried structures inland and deposited them in the rubble line that marked the surge’s maximum penetration. The damage had been severe but directional — the structures on the bay side had survived in better condition, and the island itself remained above water throughout the storm’s passage.
Miami’s damage had been distributed across the urban area, with the most severe structural failures in the boom-era construction that had been built without the engineering standards the storm would eventually mandate. The damage was significant. The city remained recognizable.
Okeechobee’s damage had been concentrated in the dike-breach zone along the south shore, where the lake surge had inundated the communities behind the earthwork. The flooding was catastrophic for the people in its path. The landscape was altered but not erased.
The Keys damage was different in kind.
It was not concentrated on one side. It was complete on both sides. It was not distributed across an urban area. It was total across a corridor. It was not a matter of structures damaged or neighborhoods flooded. It was the removal of the built environment from the geography, the subtraction of everything human from the coral surface, the reduction of inhabited islands to their geological baseline.
The convergence had executed.
The water began to recede.