Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928

Herb Donald, a survivor of the September 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, described seeing a mother holding a baby, sitting on top of a house floating away. "The baby was torn out of her arms, slid down the roof, disappeared into the black water." The storm dropped 18 inches of rain in less than 24 hours, with winds of up to 150 miles per hour that ripped through Puerto Rico, leaving half a million people homeless and destroying the valuable coffee crop. Making landfall in Florida, the storm leveled Palm Beach and tore west into Lake Okeechobee, causing it to overflow. Along Florida's Everglades alone the storm took 3,000 lives, the majority African American migrant workers. After the storm died down, national and local volunteer crews scoured the debris for survivors, buried the dead, and aided refugees. With almost $25 million in damage (almost $400 million today) it took a concerted effort to recover.