The communities on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee were not uniform in their relationship to the lake.
Canal Point sat at the eastern end of the south shore, at the place where the North New River Canal began its run south toward Fort Lauderdale and the coast. The canal was the reason the town existed: it was the drainage infrastructure that made the muck plain cultivable, and Canal Point was the point at which the canal and the lake met.
Pahokee sat a few miles to the south along the lake shore. Belle Glade sat further south still, at the mouth of the Miami Canal. South Bay was at the southern tip of the lake’s reach.
These were the communities the flood moved through on the night of September 16th.
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The levee on the south shore was not one structure.
It was a series of structures of varying age, varying construction, and varying height, connected in a line that was intended to hold the lake from the land but that had not been built to a single standard and had not been maintained to a single standard. The oldest sections had been built in the years after Moore Haven — after the 1926 flood that had killed several hundred people at Moore Haven on the west shore — but the construction had proceeded in segments as funding became available, and the segments were not of equal capability.
The section near Canal Point held longer than some of the others.
The section near Belle Glade did not hold as long.
The Analyst treated this differential as physical fact rather than blame. The levee failed first where height and material gave the water the least resistance.
The difference, in some locations, was measured in minutes. In those minutes, some people moved to higher ground or higher floors or higher trees.
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The people of Canal Point knew the lake.
Canal Point included families who had been on the south shore for a decade or more — long enough to know which stretches of levee felt stronger, which roads climbed slightly, and which routes ran into lower ground.
This knowledge was not universal in Canal Point. There were residents who had arrived in recent years, drawn by the agricultural expansion and the infrastructure investment. They knew the community but not the land at the depth that the older residents knew it.
The flood did not distinguish between these categories of residents.
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The railroad embankment at Canal Point became a refuge.
The Florida East Coast Railway had built an embankment across the muck plain to carry its tracks. The embankment sat several feet above the general terrain — not high enough to be entirely above the flood surface when the lake moved, but high enough to be above the first water, and then above some portion of the water that followed, and for some people who reached it in time it held them above the deepest part of the flood.
People on the embankment waited through the night of September 16th and the early hours of September 17th with the water moving around them and the wind continuing at hurricane force and the rain continuing horizontally and the darkness continuing without reference.
The embankment held.
The water eventually stopped rising.
The wind eventually began to diminish as the storm moved northwest.
The people on the embankment were, in the morning, alive and on ground that was above the water.
* * *
Not everyone in Canal Point reached the embankment.
The distance between a house in the lower areas of Canal Point and the railroad embankment was, in daylight on dry ground, a walk of several minutes. In black water of unknown depth, in a wind that was still at hurricane force, in the dark, carrying children or elderly relatives or simply moving alone through an environment that provided no reference, the same distance was a different proposition.
The Analyst kept the distance as a measure of what flood conditions had done to geography.
The people who survived in Canal Point were, in the aggregate, those who were closest to the embankment when the water came, or those who were able to move fastest through the water that came, or those who had somewhere to go above the water that was not the embankment — a second floor, a strong roof, a tree that held.
The canal that gave the town its name filled with the lake and ran in both directions simultaneously as the water sought its level. In the dark, the canal was indistinguishable from the surrounding muck plain except by depth. People who stepped into the canal did not always step back out.