EDITOR'S NOTE: The following fictional account of a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane first appeared in Key West The Newspaper in June, 1995. The author is David Wiseman, the former hurricane consultant to the state's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.
It was 5 p.m., Monday, September 29, and like most of the Key West residents who had refused to leave, only a few Key Haven folks even bothered to take notice as the water rose higher on their canal docks that was usual for a no-moon high tide.
Down the road at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station, the flight operations officer worried about the increasing amount of seawater at the end of his runway while he continued loading military dependents on Air Force C-141's bound for a hurricane hole in Orlando. Key West International Airport ground controllers, on the other hand, were directing a U.S. Air Dash-7 from Tampa, three quarters full of German tourists, to its arrival gate.
A couple of conch kids had somehow dug up surfboards from god knows where and were wistfully gazing reefward from a Smathers Beach lightly speckled with sunbathers wrapping it up for the day. Tourists, either oblivious or ignorant of what was going on, beeped past them on rented scooters.
Duval Street bars were ceremoniously taping their windows once again and touching up hand lettered "Hurricane Party" signs left over from the last two tropical storm warnings. But a few of the pony-tailed owners were glancing uneasily over their shoulders at an unseen but rapidly advancing darkness out toward the Marquesas.
The President of the Hotel/Motel Association and the City Manager had been screaming at each other so long they were nearly hoarse, great pulsating blood vessels throbbing under thinning white hair. Tourists were to have been warned of the coming danger, but this was the third time this season the hotels had been told to send their guests packing. And this time they didn't.
The Monroe County Emergency Management Team in Marathon and the National Hurricane Center in Miami observed that Tropical Storm Darlene had intensified into Hurricane Darlene and was now packing winds of 125 miles per hour, making her a Category 3 storm. She had passed through the lower Caribbean virtually unhampered until she bounced off the Yucatan Peninsula and turned northeast toward Havana, now on a direct line with Key West.
Emergency Management's forecasting team put the danger well past the 25-percent probability of a Category 3 storm, and issued the order to begin evacuating the Upper Keys in order to clear the narrow Overseas Highway for the Middle and Lower Keys in a few hours. The tourists were supposed to have already been long gone, but they weren't.
And this time around, the FM radio stations in the Keys flatly refused to hand over their frequencies to Emergency Management after two false alarms in seven weeks. Jimmy Buffett continued to croon about Margaritaville and cheeseburgers in paradise.
The Emergency Management Director knew he should have quit after the second false alarm three weeks ago. He felt totally alone, vilified by everyone including the County Manager and Commissioners whom he had briefed on this very scenario.
"Jesus," he muttered. "If we're gonna evacuate on a 25-percent chance of a landfalling Hurricane, we've got a 75-percent chance that it won't. No wonder they're pissed off."
The disruption of the tourists, jobs, families, and the collective fear generated during the two previous disorganized evacuations was incalculable. A number of people had died during the unnecessary exercises— hospital patients, premature babies and senior citizens in stabilized atmospheres had perished during the hurried scramble northward in un-airconditioned Monroe County school buses. Then both storms turned abruptly away with a departing slap of rain showers and arced back out to sea through some mostly uninhabited Bahamian islands.
Now it was happening all over again! The entire County Emergency apparatus was reluctantly going through the motions of another evacuation up scary Route 1 and her scarier bridges, and very few people were heeding it. With 18 hours to do something, the Emergency Management Director instead took extra time to pray that the damn thing would turn and decimate Cuba. If it weren't for the discipline of 26 years in the Army before this job, he'd be the first one up the Keys.
The local Navy bras reviewed the alert, and for the third time this season began their count-downs and check lists in an almost mindless fashion, setting their own hurricane plans in motion. That mind set saved the lives of most of the sailors and their families.
The few local people who thought something might happen busied themselves with candles, bottled water and Spam, but with little or no thought of evacuation. Many Key West homes had not yet completely removed their storm shutters from the drill three weeks ago or the month before that. With no plans, local school kids, let out early once again for a hurricane emergency, goofed off and lazed around, feeling some justice for the lack of snow days enjoyed by their counterparts up north.
Conchs old and young reassured themselves and newcomers that hurricanes never hurt Key West thanks to the reef and the Madonna. The fact that the reef and the shallow surrounding water depths raises the dome of approaching storm water was lost on them, as were the hundreds of hurricanes that have washed over this cap rock in the 500 years of recorded history. Most Key Westers were bone weary of hurricane warnings that never amounted to anything.
Besides, it was a beautiful day, 84 degrees, and dozens of boaters were heading out after work for Western Sambo following a report of voraciously hungry Mutton Snappers.
In 24 hours, over 17,000 Key West residents would be dead. Later it would be determined that an additional 7,500 tourists were killed, with 3,500 more missing and presumed dead. It was to become the greatest natural disaster in U. S. history.
But Key Westers went serenely, relatively secure in their collective thoughts that they would beat the odds. By 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, only a few restless residents were aware that Darlene now had 150-170-mile per hour winds, a 30-mile wide eye and was glancing off the northwest tip of Cuba. The Category 5 storm was peppering Havana with 90-100 mile per hour winds and torrential rain, and was now on a direct track for Key Wet with the eye expected to make landfall about noon that day.
A quick thumb through the stations on the radios at 5 a.m. revealed nothing but taped rock and roll programs and fundamentalist preachers. Only the Weather Channel's excited meteorologists were discussing the circular center in Northern Cuba large enough to encompass most of Dade County. The counter-clockwise rotation was causing 50-mph winds in Key West from the east, which caused more confusion and doubt.
Police in roving cars abandoned their bureaucratic demeanor and competed with the howl of the winds to broadcast, "The Hurricane is coming! Evacuate! Evacuate!" Dawn would enhance the greenish overcast while palm fronds and pieces of Key West roofing began floating over the city and thousands of boats began straining at their springlines.
By 7 a.m., Key Westers got the picture. Most of the residents remained true to their promises and began to hunker down in their homes. But many, frightened at last, took to the roads. The first tragedy, a major one, occurred at the gateway intersection of North and South Roosevelt Boulevards and U.S. 1. A panicky camper van was struck by a Winn-Dixie semi as the two vehicles were merging into Route 1 short of the Cow Key Channel Bridge. The 18-wheeler jackknifed and flipped onto its side across all three lanes of traffic. Motorists jumped the grass median to get to the southbound lanes into the face of oncoming traffic. The wind, rain and poor visibility combined with utter panic as drivers did unthinkable things with their automobiles, clawing past one another to get a shot over the bridge and the four lanes to salvation that lay ahead. Instead, total chaos reigned as traffic backed up the entire Key West side of Stock Island. Cars, trucks, buses, vans and campers blocked all four lanes and both shoulders all the way back to White Street and Smathers Beach. On the north side of the island, most of the vehicles would be washed into the waters off Sigsbee later that day. Macabre deaths also came later to some of the people stranded in the traffic jammed at Smathers Beach as they left their cars in search of shelter. Unable to find a safe lee from the windblown imported sand, they were literally sandblasted to death.
Almost as if she were responding to the cries of environmentalists that a lack of hurricanes was causing the death of the Everglades and the pollution of Florida Bay, Darlene continued moving rapidly to embrace all of Monroe County. By 9 a.m., the winds at Key West had passed the 100 mph mark, and it appeared the storm would roll up the rest of the Keys like a flanking movement in a military operation. Cradled in the right half of the 30-mile wide eye of the storm was a mound of water 15 feet high caused by the inverse low barometric pressure and the sucking action of the revolving winds.
At 9:30, electric power was gone and so, hours before, was the last hurricane party. Only one houseboat remained fastened to Houseboat Row. The others joined hundreds of boats and derelict watercraft in Cow Key channel, and at every other bridge in the County, to pound repeatedly at bridge pilings and access ramps. Twelve bridges on the Overseas Highway were demolished that day. No one was going anywhere now, neither in nor out, nor was anyone coming this way to help. Gone with the bridges was the County water supply and all lines of communication.
At 10 a.m., the roof and aluminum siding on the Sheraton and La Brisa complexes were joining sections of meticulously restored conch houses now airborne over Sunset Key. The exclusive condominium development there had already been swept into the sea, leaving only the sunbleached and coral rock protruding, like a gigantic white bald head, above the crashing surf. Peary Court, the navy's newest housing project, was one of the first total casualties, adding its metal roofs and plastic siding to the debris raining down on the residents of Old Town and the handful of harbor islands. Waves were relentlessly beating against Key West By The Sea, and the 1800 Atlantic horseshoe had filled with pounding debris well before the sea surge hit. Small aircraft from the airport had broken their moorings and several had landed upside down on Tommy Roberts field, one squarely atop the pitchers mound Stadium and Poinciana trailer parks were gone, and mud, muck and pieces of mangrove from the Salt Ponds showered down on concrete slabs where mobile homes used to stand. Chunks of metal and concrete blocks from Poinciana, another housing project recently excessed to the city for low-cost dwellings, rolled like tumble weeds into the Gulf after battering nearby Solana Village and Searstown.
By 10:30, the terror was incredible. Residents with houses still standing had packed whole families into closets and braced against the 140 mph winds which had long since ripped away the flimsy combination awning and storm shutters favored so much in the city. Wind gusts roaring through windows and doors popped roof trusses, and the outside winds took them away to crash on someone else's home.
There was no tidal wave of crashing fury when the surge came, only a slow rising flood through the streets and yards with winds adding another six feet of punishing surf atop the water that gradually covered the first floor of most of Key West. The frame houses on Solares Hill spared by the flooding were easy prey to early winds and were part of the westward movement of Key West toward the Gulf of Mexico, filling the Northwest Passage with hopes and dreams. The families that had huddled in closets and bathrooms now tried to swim out of their death traps and into the killer melee.
Death did not come to Key West in great gulps, but singly and doubly as family members drowned in the rising waters and drifted with the debris into the relentless sea. In an eerie display, the millions of gallons of fuel from the giant Navy and City electric tanks burst forth and ignited, illuminating the mid-day horror.
As 11 a.m. approached, with the indescribable howling at its greatest, the skies first yellowed, the quieted, then quickly cleared. The two-hour bright silence was broken only by an occasional distant raised voice seeking a loved one. At 1 p.m., it began again as the storm eye finished its cruel respite and the winds began again at 150 mph, now gusting to 170 from the opposite direction and churning the waters covering the island anew as the storm surge receded to the north. Structures remaining but weakened by the earlier winds were finished off by the rain, wind and surge forces coming from the opposite direction. The waterfront Hilton and Hyatt Sunset Harbor resorts were reduced to toothpicks by the reverse pounding, and the northwest corner of Ft. Zachary Taylor, now at the mercy of crashing waves, slid into the sea.
Key West lay in total ruin. Only 12 buildings, substantially damaged, remained to provide some historic account of this monumental tragedy. The unburned fuel from the burst navy and CES fuel tanks lay spread and seeping into what once was The Meadows and New Town. Some would later liken it to the times when biblical armies would destroy an area then scourge the earth. Many of those who miraculously survived would die in the fights over water and food as the basest of instincts took over Paradise. More would die of injuries, disease and illness, since U.S. 1 and so many of the bridges linking Key West to the mainland were destroyed. Airfields were in ruin, and the ship channels, narrow in the best of times, were filled with debris and sunken watercraft.
The rest of the Keys fared no better, and a far greater area was affected than by Hurricane Andrew of 1992. Now millions of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale area residents were clamoring for the most basic of needs to ensure their very existence. FEMA simply did what was prudent with their limited capacity: They wrote Key West off.
Before leaving Key West, ecologist Jack Lawson wrote, "Hurricanes . . . exist to pump heat and moisture from the tropics— which has too much, to higher latitudes— which have too little. Florida has tornadoes, floods, sinkholes, lightning storms, wild fire and drought— in abundance. Nature has set the stage and written the script, and just because humans don't understand or approve of her melodramatic style doesn't mean she will forgo environmental housecleaning."
AUTHOR'S NOTE: While the preceding was a fictional account of one of hundreds of scenarios that could affect Key West, many horrors described were taken from events that have already occurred and been chronicled in the Keys following storms over the last 60 years, and from accounts of the more recent devastation caused by Hurricane Andrew. Some situations are based on similar events that occurred elsewhere. Other narratives reflect real meteorological phenomenon and the concerns of Disaster and Emergency managers in Monroe County.