Camp 3 and Camp 5 received the eye wall’s full passage without the train.
The camps on Lower Matecumbe Key had been established on the low ground south of the Islamorada station — a mile and a half of narrow coral island, a quarter mile wide at its broadest, five to six feet above mean high water at its highest. The structures were the standard FERA camp construction: wooden frames on low foundations, tarpaper roofing, screen-sided barracks that admitted the summer air and the insects and that offered, against winds of 160 knots and a surge measured in dozens of feet, approximately the same resistance that a screen door offers against a fire hose.
The structures were gone before the eye arrived.
The first eye wall — the northeast passage, the bay-side surge — had destroyed the camp buildings during the hours before the eye’s calm descended on the corridor. The wind had taken the roofs first, then the walls, then the frames, dismantling the structures in the reverse sequence of their construction, each component failure releasing more material into the debris field that the wind drove across the island. The surge from Florida Bay had risen through the ruins, lifting the floor sections and the foundation timbers from their positions and floating them away from the camp sites.
By the time the eye passed over Lower Matecumbe, the camps existed only as abstract coordinates — the locations where buildings had stood, now indistinguishable from the surrounding island surface except for the concrete pads and the plumbing stubs that the water had not been able to remove.
The men who had been in Camp 3 and Camp 5 were distributed across the island in the positions where the first passage had deposited them.
Some had found the railroad embankment and held on. The embankment ran along the island’s length, and its raised fill — eight to ten feet above mean high water — had offered a refuge during the first passage’s bay-side surge that was marginally above the water level on either side. The men who had reached the embankment pressed themselves against its leeward side and gripped whatever the fill offered — railroad ties, the steel rail, the spikes that fastened the rail to the ties — and held their bodies against the fill while the wind tried to lift them and the water tried to carry them and the sand tried to strip the skin from whatever surface the wind could reach.
Some had found trees. The coconut palms and the hardwoods that grew in the island’s interior offered vertical objects to which a man could lash himself above the worst of the surge. The men who had rope or wire bound themselves to the trunks. The men who had belts used their belts. The men who had nothing wrapped their arms around the trunks and held on with the strength that the difference between holding and letting go provided, which was the difference between life and death and which no measurement of muscle fatigue or endurance could predict in advance.
Some held. Some did not.
* * *
The back eye wall arrived at Lower Matecumbe from the south-southwest and delivered the ocean surge across the island from a direction the men on the embankment had not been sheltering against.
The men who had positioned themselves on the embankment’s northeastern face — sheltered from the first passage’s northeast wind — were now on the windward face of the back passage’s southwest wind. The wind reversed. The shelter reversed. The men who had been protected were now exposed. The surge that came from the south-southwest crossed the island and struck the embankment from the side that had been sheltered minutes before, and the men on that side received the full force of the ocean’s arrival.
The water carried them.
The surge at Lower Matecumbe was measured after the fact at approximately seventeen feet above normal tide — twelve feet above the island’s surface, seven feet above the railroad embankment’s crest. Nothing on the island exceeded this height except the tops of the surviving palm trees, and the men who had been lashed to the palms found themselves submerged to the depth of seven feet below the surge’s surface, held underwater by the bindings that had been intended to keep them above the water, drowning while attached to the objects they had chosen as their salvation.
The Council observed the Lower Matecumbe passage as the convergence executing at its point of maximum effect.
On Lower Matecumbe, every part of the problem met at once: violent pressure, concentrated wind, low ground, the railroad embankment acting as both refuge and hydraulic hazard, men placed there by federal order, and no remaining time to move them.
Lower Matecumbe was the center of the convergence.
The twelve-mile corridor of total destruction ran through it.
The men who survived did so by circumstances that the Council could measure but not predict: the position of the tree they clung to relative to the surge’s flow, the strength of the binding that held them to it, the direction they happened to be facing when the wind reversed, the depth of the water relative to their height above the ground. The survival of any individual in the eye wall’s passage was a function of variables too numerous and too interdependent to calculate in advance.
The deaths were calculable.
The convergence was calculable.
The Council watched what the numbers could explain and left the rest to contingency.