The Night the Lake Came Over the Levee

The historian Eliot Kleinberg, writing about why the warnings did not reach the people who needed them, put the communication problem this way: "To say that they knew or didn't hear the hurricane warning presumes that they had a radio, which in 1928, a lot of people didn't, and there certainly wasn't any television."

The warning itself said the storm would miss. On the night of September 15, 1928, weather officials in Florida were telling people it would not hit the state. It had been moving across the Atlantic for ten days by then — a tropical depression near Senegal on September 6, then across Puerto Rico, then toward the eastern coast of the peninsula.

It came ashore on September 16. The exact landing point depends on which marker you read — the Florida Historical Society places it near West Palm Beach, the historical marker at the site places it near the Jupiter Lighthouse. Accounts vary.

It crossed Palm Beach County and went west. On the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee, mud levees held back sixty miles of shallow water. Behind them sat the muck country's bean fields and cane, and the labor camps and farm towns of the workers who picked them.

Most of those workers were migrants. The historical marker at the site is explicit on this point: most of the hurricane's fatalities were migrant farm workers, killed when the Lake Okeechobee levees broke.

The wall of water that came over the top was twenty feet high in some places.

How many died is a number no one agrees on. The Palm Beach Post puts it at as many as 3,000. The historical marker at the site puts it at 2,500. NOAA, cited in the Miami Herald, calls it the deadliest hurricane in Florida history by lives lost.

The dead were migrant workers, many of them Black and Bahamian. They were buried where they were found, or in mass graves whose locations were marked imprecisely and later forgotten. Some were not buried.

Polk County sits to the northwest of Lake Okeechobee. Twelve hurricane eyes have passed over the county in recorded history. The 1928 storm, by the time it reached this far inland, was a Category 2, strong enough to take down citrus and tear roofs.

The packing houses kept running, and the groves were assessed and replanted.

The bean fields kept producing and the labor camps on the lake's edge remained. The federal government built the Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee.