1928 — Sep 16, Great Okeechobee Hurricane and Flooding, Southeast FL –2,500-3,000

–6,000 All Caribbean and FL deaths. Mykle. Killer ‘Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. xvi.
–4,075 All deaths. Gunn, “Lake Okeechobee hurricane,” Chap. 87, Encyclopedia of Disasters, p316.
–3,400 Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, FL. Davies. Inside the Hurricane. 2000, p. 247.

Florida:
–2500-3,000 Blanchard. We use NWS Memorial Webpage for low, and Blake, etc. for high.
–2500-3,000 Blake, et al. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense US Cyclones…, Apr 2007.
–2500-3,000 Norcross. Hurricane Almanac, p. 50. (Notes official death toll now is <2,500.) --2400-3,000 Mykle. Killer ‘Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. 2002. --1800-3,000 City of Palm Beach and Florida State Department Memorial Marker. -- 2,750 Townsend. The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina. Appendix E, Table 1.2, 2006. -- 2,500 Bedient/Sebastian. “An Introduction to Gulf Coast Severe Storms…” 2012, p. 8. --1800-2,500 Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. Hurricane. NY: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 958, 270 -- 2,500 Gunn, “Lake Okeechobee hurricane,” Chap. 87, Encyclopedia of Disasters, p. 316. -- <2,500 NWS. Memorial Webpage for 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. US NOAA, 2004. -- 2,300 Miami Daily News. Sep 25, 1928. -- 2,200 Miami Daily News. Sep 24, 1928. -- 2,136 Sav. Natural Disasters: Some Empirical and Economic Considerations. 1974, 8 -- 1,836 Barnes, Jay. Florida’s Hurricane History. Chapel Hill. London: UNC Press. -- 1,836 Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. EM DAT Database. -- 1,836 Hebert. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense [US] Hurricanes… 1993. -- 1,836 Jarrell. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense [US] Hurricanes… 2001. -- 1,836 Larson, Erik. “Waiting For Hurricane X.” Time Magazine, September 7, 1998. -- 1,836 Ludlum, David M. The American Weather Book. Boston: Mifflin, 1982, p. 191. -- 1,836 “NOAA’s Top U.S. Weather, Water and Climate Events of the 20th Century.” -- 1,836 Sumner. “The North Atlantic Hurricane…Sep 8-16, 1944.” MWR, 72/9, 1944, 187. -- >1,800 Davies. Inside the Hurricane: Face to Face with Nature’s Deadliest Storms, p. 69.
— <1,800 Hudgins. Tropical Cyclones Affecting North Carolina Since 1586… 2000. Narrative Information NOAA: “The Great Okeechobee Flood and Hurricane of 1928. An immense Category 4 Hurricane with 150 mph winds, rain and resulting flooding caused a death toll of 1,836 in Florida, and another 1,575 in the Caribbean. Some estimate the death toll as high as 3,500. The hurricane fell just short of establishing a new record low for barometric pressure at 27.43 inches (a reading of 27.37 inches was measured in 1919). Only the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (over 6,000 deaths), the Johnstown Flood of 1889 (2,200 deaths) and the two hurricanes of 1893 (2,000 deaths each) are likely to have caused more deaths in the United States.” (NOAA. “NOAA’s Top U.S. Weather, Water and Climate Events of the 20th Century.” 1999.) NWS: “Only two years after the Great Miami Hurricane, what would become the second category 4 … hurricane to strike South Florida in as many years formed off the coast of Africa in early September. It…devastated the island of Guadeloupe on September 12, moved through the Virgin Islands, and struck a direct hit on Puerto Rico on the 13th … More than 300 persons were killed…. It moved through the Bahama Islands on September 14-15, and on Sunday evening around 6:15 PM, Sep. 16, the hurricane made landfall in…Palm Beach County between Jupiter and Boca Raton…. A storm surge around 10 feet with waves likely as high as 20 feet crashed into the barrier islands including Palm Beach. However, the greatest loss of life was around Lake Okeechobee. As the…hurricane moved inland, the strong winds piled the water up at the south end of the lake, ultimately topping the levee… Thousands of people, mostly non-white migrant farm workers, drowned as water several feet deep spread over an area approximately 6 miles deep and 75 miles long around the south end of the lake…. “The NWS had long listed the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 death toll as 1,836, making it the second worst hurricane death toll since the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. No doubt use of this figure by the NWS dates to Mitchell (1928), who quoted a Red Cross official casualty estimate dated October 28, 1928. Dunn and Miller (1960) also quote the Red Cross figure. Pfost (2003) called for a revision of the death toll to 2,500 with an asterisk, denoting that the exact number of people killed will never be known. Blake et al. in the latest (2005) update to the National Hurricane Center publication "The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Tropical Cyclones" lists the death toll from the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 as "at least 2,500"…. “The hurricane continued northwest across the lake and…turned north through Highlands and Polk counties, passing near Gainesville and west of Jacksonville before paralleling the Atlantic coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas. It finally moved inland over [VA] and became extratropical over [PA] and the Great Lakes.” (National Weather Service. Memorial Webpage for 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. U.S. NOAA, 2004.) Douglas: “Afterwards at Lake Okeechobee: “Rescue workers and appalled elderly militia men, sickened Boy Scouts [were] hastily brought in by the truckload…. In a day or two the dead were beyond recognition, tied in long strings and towed behind launches to the railway platforms. Seven hundred were buried in one long trench in West Palm Beach [see Pfost at 1361 on two burial sites]. After the fourth day under the hot sun they could only be piled up and burned in great pyres. No one will ever know how many more than the estimated 1,800 to 2,500 died there.” (Douglas 1958, p. 270) Sources Barnes, Jay. Florida’s Hurricane History. Chapel Hill and London: UNC Press, 1998. Bedient, Philip B. and Antonia Sebastian. “An Introduction to Gulf Coast Severe Storms and Hurricanes,” pp. 1-15 in: Bedient, Philip B. (Ed.) Lessons From Hurricane Ike. Texas A&M University Press, 2012. Google preview accessed at: http://books.google.com/books?id=gelBBDRUjCcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Blake, Eric S., Edward N. Rappaport, and Christopher W. Landsea. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Cyclones From 1851 to 2006. Miami, FL: National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center, April 15, 2007 update, 45 pages. Accessed at: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/Deadliest_Costliest.shtml Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. EM DAT Database. Louvain, Belgium: Universite Catholique do Louvain. Accessed at: http://www.emdat.be/ City of Palm Beach and Florida State Department Memorial Marker. Hurricane of 1928 Mass Burial Site. Florida Historical Markers, Waymarking.com. Posted 10-28-2009. Accessed 11-15-2017 at: http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM7HMQ Davies, Pete. Inside the Hurricane: Face to Face with Nature’s Deadliest Storms. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000. Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. Hurricane. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1958, 393 pp. Hebert, Paul J., J.D. Jarrell, Max Mayfield. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Hurricanes of This Century (NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS-NHC-31). Miami, FL: National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce 1993, 41 pages. Hudgins, James E. Tropical Cyclones Affecting North Carolina Since 1586: An Historical Perspective (National Weather Service Technical Memos, NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS ER-92). NWS, Eastern Regional HQ, Scientific Services Div., Bohemia NY. April 2000. http://web.archive.org/web/20070311045226/http://repository.wrclib.noaa.gov/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=nws_tech_memos Jarrell, Jerry D., Max Mayfield, Edward N. Rappaport, Christopher W. Landsea. The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Hurricanes From 1900 to 2000 (And Other Frequently Requested Hurricane Facts) (NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS TPC-1). Miami, FL: NOAA NWS and Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, October 2001 Update. Accessed at: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/index.html Larson, Erik. “Waiting For Hurricane X.” Time Magazine, 9-7-1998. Accessed 11-15-2017 at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989035-1,00.html Ludlum, David M. The American Weather Book. Boston: Mifflin, 1982. Miami Daily News, September 24, 1928. Miami Daily News, September 25, 1928. . Mykle, Robert. Killer ‘Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “NOAA’s Top U.S. Weather, Water and Climate Events of the 20th Century.” NOAA News, 12-13-1999. Accessed 11-15-2017 at: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s334c.htm National Weather Service, Weather Forecast Office, Miami, FL. Memorial Webpage for 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. Miami: NWS WFO, Miami, NOAA, 2004. Accessed 11-15-2017 at: https://www.weather.gov/mfl/okeechobee Norcross, Bryan. Hurricane Almanac: The Essential Guide to Storms Past, Present, and Future. NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007. Pfost, Russell L. “Reassessing The Impact of Two Historical Florida Hurricanes.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 84, Issue 10, October 2003, pp. 1367-1372. Accessed at: http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/84/10/pdf/i1520-0477-84-10-1367.pdf Sav, Thomas G. Natural Disasters: Some Empirical and Economic Considerations (Final Report, NBSIR 74-473). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standards, Institute for Applied Technology, Center for Building Technology, Building Economics Section, February 1974, 74 pages. Accessed 7-12-2017 at: http://www.fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/build74/PDF/b74006.pdf Sumner, H. C. “The North Atlantic Hurricane of September 8-16, 1944.” Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 72, No. 9, 12-5-1944, pp. 187-189. Accessed 11-13-2017 at: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/lib/lib1/nhclib/mwreviews/1944.pdf Townsend, Francis Fragos (Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism). The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned. Washington, DC: White House, 2-23-2006. Accessed at: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned/index.html Also at: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned/appendix-e.html