The Great Miami Hurricane struck South Florida in September 1926, at the height of the region’s land boom, killing an estimated several hundred people — a toll historians believe was significantly undercounted, particularly among Black residents whose deaths went poorly recorded.
The storm ended the Florida land boom almost overnight and exposed how much of the region’s rapid growth had outrun its building standards.
The Council opened its record twenty-six years earlier with Galveston.
The Great Miami Hurricane underscores the The Storm Council’s multi-generational view of hurricane disasters and human intervention. The Storm Council’s record is never about one city: the same confidence, the same undercounting, the same gap between growth and preparedness reappeared in a different state, a different decade, a different storm.
The Council’s Continuity Above All principle holds that Miami’s story in many ways is a continuation, and recreation of consequences felt in Galveston, Texas 26 years earlier.
Follow The Storm Council — the Record is long, and this is just one page of it.