The Archivist then filed the storm’s vital statistics against the full American record.
Minimum central pressure near landfall: 892 millibars, 26.35 inches, from Duane’s Long Key reading during the eye. No lower sea-level pressure had been recorded at landfall in the United States.
In intensity, the storm sat at the upper edge of anything the modern American record had measured. The Weather Bureau lacked the later category language, but the physical evidence was plain.
Maximum sustained winds were estimated near 160 knots from the pressure, the size of the core, and the damage across the corridor.
The radius of maximum wind was about five nautical miles, giving the storm a ring of worst destruction only about ten miles wide and making the strike unusually precise.
Storm tide: ten to eighteen feet above normal tide at the Keys corridor. The range reflected the variation in surge height along the corridor’s twelve-mile length — higher at the points where the eye wall’s maximum winds drove the surge directly onshore, lower at the points north and south of the eye wall’s center where the wind speed and the surge-generating force were reduced. The surge exceeded the islands’ elevation by five to twelve feet. The excess was the depth of water that stood on the land — or, more precisely, the depth of water that submerged the land, the islands disappearing beneath the surge for the duration of the eye wall’s passage.
* *
The human toll.
Four hundred and eight confirmed dead. One hundred and sixty-five listed as missing — bodies not recovered, survival not confirmed. The veterans’ camps accounted for two hundred and fifty-seven of the confirmed dead. The year-round Keys population accounted for the remainder — fishermen, railroad workers, residents of the communities that the corridor contained.
The toll was smaller in absolute numbers than Galveston’s or Okeechobee’s. The Galveston entry contained approximately eight thousand dead. The Okeechobee entry contained approximately twenty-five hundred dead. The Keys entry contained four hundred and eight confirmed.
The comparison was misleading.
The smaller number reflected the smaller population at risk, not a lesser intensity of destruction. The Keys corridor contained approximately one thousand people — veterans, year-round residents, camp staff, fishing camp guests — on the night of September 2. The casualty rate was approximately forty percent. At Galveston, the casualty rate against the island’s population had been approximately twenty-one percent. At Okeechobee, the casualty rate against the south-shore farming communities had been roughly comparable but was imprecisely measured because the at-risk population was itself imprecisely counted.
The Keys’ casualty rate was the highest in the Florida archive.
The casualty rate in the Keys was the highest of the Florida entries.
* * *
Set against Galveston, Miami, and Okeechobee, the Labor Day storm stood out not because it replaced their lessons but because it combined them.
Galveston kept the greatest total death toll. Miami kept the greatest financial collapse. Okeechobee kept the great inland-water catastrophe. Labor Day added the greatest intensity, the highest casualty rate, the most concentrated corridor strike, and the first permanent destruction of a Florida transport system.
The numbers mattered. The relationship between them mattered more.
892 millibars. Five-mile radius of maximum wind. Twelve-mile corridor. Quarter-mile width. Five to eight feet of elevation. Ten to eighteen feet of surge. 160 knots. 408 dead. Forty-two miles of railroad destroyed. One system permanently eliminated. One new filing category created.
The numbers were filed.
The Archivist kept them all.
The record moved forward.