Filed by The Storm Council Analyst
On September 2, 1935, the Weather Bureau warned of a hurricane bearing down on the Florida Keys.
Fred Ghent, the federal administrator responsible for several hundred World War veterans working in camps on Windley Key and Lower Matecumbe, ordered an evacuation.
The Florida East Coast Railway assembled a special train and sent it south to collect the men.
By nightfall, hundreds of those veterans were dead.
This is the uncomfortable reality at the center of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935: not who failed to act, but how a system can take every right step and still lose the men it was built to save.
The Storm Council’s Last Train to the Keys traces that chain — the warning, the decision, the train, the storm — link by link, to what it still has to teach us.
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