Lake Okeechobee is very wide and very shallow. Something like seven hundred square miles of open water, and in most places only a few metres deep. A lake that shape does not behave like a bowl; it behaves like a saucer. A strong wind held steady over it for hours pushes the water to the far end and piles it there. The southern rim, in 1928, was held by a low dike of muck and sand, built to keep the farm fields dry in ordinary weather.
On this day in 1928 the hurricane crossed southeastern Florida and the water went over that dike and into the settlements below it, at night. More than 2,500 people died, most of them Black farmworkers living in the Everglades communities at the lake's southern edge. Many were seasonal workers whose names were not on any local register, and the search went on for weeks in flooded sawgrass and canal country.
The count of the dead was never completed. The figure usually given is a floor, not a total. That is worth saying plainly on the anniversary: we do not know how many people were lost, and we will not now find out.
Those settlements were bean and vegetable camps, Kit. September put the fields at the start of the winter harvest, so the packing houses and the labour camps were full when the water came, and many of the people in them had arrived only for the season.
Before Florida, the same storm crossed Guadeloupe and then Puerto Rico, where it is remembered as San Felipe Segundo. More than a thousand people died in those islands, and hundreds of thousands were left without shelter. The count there is also incomplete.