September | 2014 | GREETINGS FROM THE DRAGON LAIR DIVA

1935. In the midst of the #Depression the world was in tribulation and the times they were a changing:

Aug 7th – 60% of voters agrees to #nazism in Danzig (Gdansk)

Aug 11th – Nazi mass demonstration against #GermanJews

Aug 12 Babe Ruth‘s final game at Fenway Park

Aug 14th – Social Security Act becomes law

Aug 26th – CCC camp opens in Brecksville Reservation of Cleveland Metroparks http://www.historyorb.com/events/date/1935?p=2

The storm disaster was a combination of things:

First the storm: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane was the strongest and most intense hurricane to make landfall in the United States and the Atlantic Basin in recorded history. ..second major hurricane of the 1935 Atlantic hurricane season, the Labor Day Hurricane was the first of three Category 5 hurricanes … that the United States endured during the 20th Century (the other two being 1969‘s Hurricane Camille and 1992‘s Hurricane Andrew). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane

On September 2, 1935, Labor Day, the hurricane reached a peak intensity of 892 mb. The hurricane made landfall later that night as a Category 5 storm, crossing the Florida Keys between Key West and Miami, FL. As it made landfall, the hurricane deliveredmaximum sustained winds of approximately 298 km/h (185 mph). After passing the Keys, the hurricane slowly recurved northward and closely paralleled Florida’s west coast. The then weakened hurricane made a second landfall as a Category 2 storm near Cedar Key, FL on the afternoon of 4 September. http://www.hurricanescience.org/history/storms/1930s/LaborDay/

The Victims: The official death toll was 423 – 164 civilians and 259 World War I veterans living in three federal rehabilitation camps.

The Weather Service: While there had been predictions these were all over the board and appear there appear to have been a variety of routes predicted most through the Keys.

The villians: At the center of the story are hundreds of down-and-out World War I veterans who were sent to the Keys to work on a federal construction project; .When reports of a hurricane began reaching Florida in late August 1935, Federal Administrators ignored warnings and waited until it was too late to try to get the workers out of harm’s way.

And the after shocks: The political maneuvering that followed the tragedy obscured details of the event and very nearly cost Franklin Delano Roosevelt the election of 1936.

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Century-Labor-Hurricane-Adventure/dp/0792280105

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HEMINGWAY’S ACCOUNT: It is not necessary to go into the deaths of the civilians and their families since they were on the Keys of their own free will; They made their living there, had property and knew the hazards involved. But the veterans had been sent there; they had no opportunity to leave, nor any protection against hurricanes; and they never had a chance for their lives. Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans, many of them husky, hard-working and simply out of luck, but many of them close to the border of pathological cases, to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months? – Ernest Hemingway who brought his boat the Pilar to the area from Key West as soon as the storm cleared made these observations. “The railroad embankment was gone and the men who had cowered behind it and finally, when the water came, clung to the rails, were all gone with it. You could find them face down and face up in the mangroves. The biggest bunch of the dead were in the tangled, always green but now brown, mangroves behind the tanks cars and the water towers…. “Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presences a political danger?” http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/16158#sthash.tBflAQXZ.dpuf