What was the name of the Labor Day hurricane of 1935?

Answer 1

The U.S. Weather Bureau (later the National Weather Service) did not start naming hurricanes until 1950. So the Category 5 hurricane that struck The Florida Keys on September 2, 1935, was not given an "official" name. This hurricane, which is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the U.S., came to be known as the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 because it made landfall on Labor Day Monday. The eye of the storm crossed Long Key, Florida, where a barometric pressure reading of 26.98 inches was recorded by James Duane, who was caretaker of the Long Key Fishing Camp and an observer for the U.S. Weather Bureau. But Duane's barometer was blown away right after he made this reading. Not far away, Einar Olsen recorded a reading of 26.35 inches, which the Weather Bureau later accepted as the official lowest reading of the Labor Day hurricane. The hurricane's winds probably were gusting to 200 mph when it came ashore, and it was pushing a storm surge of at least 18 feet in its front-right quadrant. The Labor Day hurricane killed more than 250 World War I veterans who were working on a New Deal-era highway construction project in the Florida Keys. They were living in three unprotected beachfront work camps. Camp administrators tried to evacuate the veterans aboard a train sent from Miami, but the train was shoved off the tracks at Islamorada on Upper Matecumbe Key when the hurricane's powerful storm surge came ashore around 8:20 p.m. The camp administrators did not know how to properly interpret hurricane warnings and waited until too late to summon the train. There is a popular misconception that the train's engineer backed the train into the Keys. What actually happened was that the locomotive's nose was coupled to the front of the train so that the locomotive was traveling backwards as it pulled the train. The engineer's and train master's plan was to stop at each of the three work camps and pick up the waiting veterans, then use a sidetrack to move the locomotive to the other end of the train so that its headlight would be shining on the tracks as the locomotive pulled the train out of the Keys. The deaths of the veterans prompted national outrage, and several investigations were conducted. David Kennamer, an investigator for the Veterans Administration, conducted a thorough and well-reseach probe into why the vets were not evacuated ahead of the storm. But his findings that camp administrators had been At Fault were ignored, and the official finding was that the vets died because of an act of God. Kennamer's report and documentation are on file in the National Archives. The railroad was destroyed by the hurricane and not rebuilt. Instead, the Florida East Coast Railway sold the right-of-way to the state of Florida, and that right of way was used to build the highway that is now U.S. 1. By the way, I'm the author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which was published in 2002 and 2003 by National Geographic Books.