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Though "the hurricane" is treated briefly and somewhat casually in this passage, its material reality was much more gruesome than indicated. The area around Belle Glade was actually hit by two hurricanes within a span of two years, and the toll these storms took was enormous. Floods destroyed the incipient and already precarious development of the area, and the community that suffered the greatest losses of life was the population of black laborers. As Michael Gannon describes, The coup de grace was administered two months later by a fierce hurricane that slammed into the Gold Coast and Everglades with winds estimated to be between 130 and 150 miles an hour. Coming in the dead of night on September 18, 1926, the storm, the first since 1910, caught the new population unaware and unprepared...300 persons drowned at Moore Haven when a Lake Okeechobee dike crumbled and flooded the town. Over 6,000 were injured and 18,000 made homeless. The damage was immense. Two years later, almost to the day (September 16), another hurricane of equal strength hit the Florida shoreline at Palm Beach and dumped tons of water into Lake Okeechobee. The loss of life was estimated to be between 1,850 and 2,000 people, three-quarters of them black laborers- estimated because the bodies of many known to have lived in the region were never found. (Florida: A Short History83-84) |