March 10 marks six months — has it only been six months? — since Hurricane Irma flooded the Keys as a Category Four storm. Over the coming days, follow us as we take a journey down to the Keys to see what recovery looks like.
Tag Archives: Florida hurricanes
Will Irma bring a second Hurricane of 1928 to Lake Okeechobee?
It woke up old Okeechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed. —Zora Neale Hurston
The monster is not Irma. The monster is Lake Okeechobee, and I don't want or need to be right, but the more I watch the projected path of Irma the more I think about the cover story I wrote for Creative Loafing's June 1 print issue: The Monster Next Time.
"The current condition of Herbert Hoover poses a grave and imminent danger... [The dike] needs to be fixed. We can only add that it needs to be fixed now, and it needs to be fixed right. We firmly believe that the region’s future depends on it.”
Lloyd's of London risk assessment of Lake Okeechobee — not from 1928, but this millennium
Here's Irma's projected path:
Hurricane ’17: The monster next time
When Lake Okeechobee levees broke during the Hurricane of 1928, thousands died. The “new” dike is now more than 80 years old — and in dire need of repair.
In 1928, black people were pretty much out of luck when it came to good jobs in Florida. They had, essentially, three choices: tapping pine trees for turpentine, working as servants to white folks, or farming the fields.
In addition to equality, Florida lacked a few other things — such as the inclination to do something when engineers raised the alarm that the mud levee around Lake Okeechobee was about to fail.
According to Eliot Kleinberg, author of Black Cloud: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928, government officials knew. They simply didn’t do anything about it.
“In 1926, a hurricane that smashed Miami washed out a portion of the...
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