The hurricane which fell upon the Florida coast from Palm Beach to Miami at midnight on Friday left behind it 1,000 dead, 3,000 injured, and 38,000 homeless. The damage to property is estimated to amount to $125,000,000 (£25,000,000).
There are now grave fears that a new calamity has occurred, as early this morning the same hurricane struck Pensacola, in the north-western corner of the State. There are hurricane signals up along the whole coast, from Pensacola to Burwood Louisiana. In the last 24 hours thousands of people have fled from the Gulf ports to New Orleans for safety.
The east coast disaster was at its worst in Miami and the region immediately to the north, the centre of the great real estate “boom” of last year. After the first visitation, which lasted for nine hours, with the wind reaching a velocity of 130 miles an hour, there was a lull. Many people ventured forth from a shelter only to die when the hurricane returned upon its course. Amid toppling houses and streets blocked with debris and flooded with water, hundreds vainly sought safety. Wooden dwellings were ripped apart or ground into splinters, and concrete houses broke loose from their foundations. An 18-storey skyscraper, but lately finished, was so badly twisted that it will have to be demolished. Another, the office of the Miami News, was left leaning at an angle of 70deg. Some yachts and small shipping in the harbour were lifted bodily into Royal Park, and all the rest were engulfed, while the new docks were reduced to ruin.
Five hundred persons perished in Miami, but the dead had to be left untended in the streets until the injured were succoured. One hundred and fifty died in Miami Beach, killed by collapsing houses or miserably drowned, or pinned down by wreckage. At Fort Lauderdale a hundred were killed. Directly west of Palm Beach, at Moore Haven and Clewiston, 140 persons, many of them women and children, were drowned by the overflowing of Lake Okeechobee.