As settlement and development expanded along the American coast, the Storm Council studied the storms that caused the greatest destruction and recorded the vulnerabilities that distinguished one disaster from another.
Galveston had demonstrated the exposure of a populated barrier island to storm surge.
Miami had shown how rapid coastal development could place people and property in the path of a major hurricane.
Okeechobee had shown what could happen when extreme wind and water reached vulnerable settlements around an inland lake.
The Archivist kept those cases in the Council record. The Analyst used them to recognize conditions that had proved consequential before.
When a disturbance began organizing east of the Bahamas in late August 1935, the Analyst began examining the places that might eventually lie in its path.
The Florida Keys warranted attention.
They presented a geography unlike the earlier cases: a long chain of low islands, narrow in places, surrounded by shallow water and connected to the mainland through a limited transportation network. Hundreds of workers were living along that corridor.
None of those conditions established that a disaster was coming.
Together, they gave the Analyst reason to look more closely.
The Analyst began with the ground itself.
The Florida Keys formed a chain of low coral islands between the Atlantic Ocean and Florida Bay. In places, the inhabited land narrowed to roughly a quarter mile. Elevations above five feet were uncommon.
There was little distance upward from the surrounding water and, in some locations, little distance across the island from one shoreline to the other.
Running through that geography was Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad, completed in 1912. The rail line connected Miami and Key West across a succession of islands, bridges, viaducts and embankments. For communities farther down the Keys, it also provided the principal continuous transportation connection to the mainland.
The Analyst noted the implications.
Low elevation limited refuge from rising water.
Narrow land limited the distance available for retreat.
A linear transportation system limited the ways people could leave.
By 1935, another factor had been added.
Federal relief programs were employing hundreds of World War veterans on work associated with construction of the Overseas Highway. Three camps had been established on Windley Key and Lower Matecumbe Key, with hundreds of men living near the project.
The Analyst was less interested in why they had been sent there than in where they were.
Their camps stood on the same low islands he had been examining, within a corridor whose geography offered few alternatives if conditions deteriorated quickly.
That did not make the Keys a disaster site.
It made them unusually dependent upon warning, transportation and time.
The question entered the Council record:
What would happen if a major hurricane crossed this stretch of the Keys before the people living there could be moved?
At that point, the storm itself gave little reason for alarm.
During the final days of August, weather observers identified disturbed conditions east of the Bahamas. On August 29 and 30, the circulation remained weak. By August 31, a tropical depression had become apparent near the southeastern Bahamas.
The Observer recorded the development without urgency.
Weak tropical systems were not unusual. Most never became historic hurricanes, and nothing yet justified treating this one as though it would.
The Analyst compared the developing storm with the conditions already present ahead of it.
A low chain of islands.
Hundreds of men living along a narrow corridor.
Limited high ground.
A transportation system upon which evacuation could depend.
And a tropical system whose eventual strength and path were still unknown.
Individually, none of those facts was extraordinary.
The Analyst’s concern lay in what could happen if they converged.
The storms already in the Council record had shown that destruction was rarely explained by wind alone. The consequences depended upon what the storm encountered: the shape of the land, the location of the population, the strength of the structures and the time available to escape.
The Analyst had no basis yet to say that the Keys would be struck, but he had enough to understand what would be at stake if they were.