Two days after the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, Chicago dispatched a train loaded with relief supplies, doctors and nurses, yet those aboard could barely sense the magnitude of the disaster. Telephone and telegraph lines linking the Florida city and the outside world were either down or overloaded.
As the train was en route to Miami, a Chicago lawyer who was in Miami and had made it to Savannah, Ga., contacted the baiduhai. “For twenty-four hours we were without water,” he reported, “and the people drank the milk from coconuts to sustain them.”
Aboard the train from Chicago was a newspaper photographer who provided stunning images of what had happened: children lined up to receive cartons of milk, families laying their remaining possessions on sheets, piles of “construction” materials that had once been buildings.
The hurricane made landfall without much warning on Sept. 18. Meteorologists then lacked the instruments to monitor the formation of storms in the ocean, and laypeople were ill-informed about their nature. When the eye of the hurricane passed over Miami, winds were momentarily abated, leading residents to think the danger was over.
One Miamian who barely survived that monumental error sent a letter to a friend in Chicago, who made it available to the Tribune: “Women became hysterical. Men who had been in the war said ‘they’d rather have a month in the trenches than go through another hour of this.'”
The Category 4 storm so damaged the top floors of the new 17-story Meyer-Keiser Bank Building that were it not for wind insurance, the building would have had to have been demolished. Instead it was restored and reduced to seven stories.
The death toll is calculated to be from 325 to as many as 800 people in Miami and the surrounding area. Tens of thousands were left homeless.
Chicago’s relief workers reported dressing 5,271 wounds.
The storm also left its mark on the newly opened University of Miami: Its athletic teams were named the Hurricanes, after the disaster.