IV- BIG Hurricanes & Global Warming

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issue/September_2006.html
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I drive down Brickell Avenue, the heart of Miami's financial district, past bank buildings with windows still boarded up, then wend through residential neighborhoods where a smattering of rooftops remain covered with blue tarps, a reminder that even a glancing blow from a hurricane like Wilma, which slammed into Miami last October as a Category 1 storm, can pack a wicked punch.

I continue south 65 miles to the Florida Key called Islamorada, crossing over a series of bridges that connect one low-lying coral islet to another. It's the route along which automobiles crawled in the opposite direction last year as some 40,000 people fled the Lower Keys in advance of Hurricane Dennis in July. It's also the route on which an 11-car train was washed off its tracks in the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane.

The train was en route from Miami to rescue a Depression-era work crew composed largely of World War I veterans, many of whom had participated in the Bonus March on Washington in 1932. Encamped in flimsy Civilian Conservation Corps housing, the men had been working on a bridge-building project. The train got to the Islamorada station shortly after 8 p.m., just in time to confront an 18-foot-high storm surge that washed over the Upper Keys like a tsunami and knocked the train off its tracks. In all, more than 400 people died, among them at least 259 of the veterans. In a magazine piece, an enraged Ernest Hemingway, then living in Key West, lambasted Washington politicians for the loss of so many lives. "Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans...to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months?" he asked.

Hemingway's veterans are long gone from the Keys. In their place are 75,000 permanent residents, supplemented during the year by more than 2.5 million visitors. The Labor Day storm, it is worth remembering, didn't look like much just a day before it hit; it exploded from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane in 40 hours, about the amount of time an evacuation of the Keys might take today. As the storm bore down, sustained winds in the eye wall reached 160 miles per hour, with gusts that exceeded 200 miles per hour. The winds lifted up sheet metal roofs and wooden planks, hurling them through the air with lethal force; in some cases, as one writer described, "pounding sheets of sand sheared clothes and even the skin off victims, leaving them clad only in belts and shoes, often with their faces literally sandblasted beyond identification."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issue/September_2006.html