1928 Okeechobee Hurricane

The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane — also known as Hurricane San Felipe Segundo — stands as one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history and the defining catastrophe of West Palm Beach's early twentieth century. Born off the west coast of Africa near Dakar, Senegal on September 6, the storm churned westward across the Atlantic and struck Puerto Rico on September 13 before crossing the Bahamas and making landfall on the southeastern coast of Florida on the evening of September 16. It hit as a Category 4 — a retroactive designation applied by modern meteorologists using the Saffir-Simpson scale, which did not exist in 1928 — with sustained winds estimated at around 145 mph (233 km/h) at landfall. The eye passed over West Palm Beach in the early hours of September 17; in the city, more than 1,700 homes were destroyed. But the true horror lay inland. The failure of earthen levees around Lake Okeechobee sent walls of water over entire communities. At least 2,500 people died, and some researchers place the true toll closer to 3,000 or higher, making it the second deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history after the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. West Palm Beach still carries the marks: mass burial sites, memorial parks, and ongoing debates about racial justice in disaster response.

Background and Path

Only two years after the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, another powerful storm was forming. It developed off the west coast of Africa near Dakar, Senegal on September 6, 1928, as a tropical depression. It would become the second Category 4 storm to strike South Florida in just two years. The system churned across the Atlantic, devastated the island of Guadeloupe on September 12, moved through the Virgin Islands, and struck Puerto Rico on September 13, which happened to be El Día de San Felipe on the Catholic calendar, giving the storm its Spanish name. More than 300 people died in Puerto Rico alone, and the hurricane destroyed the island's coffee-growing industry, which had been one of its primary exports. That industry never fully recovered. Across the wider Caribbean, estimates suggest between 300 and 1,000 people had already perished before the storm reached Florida, though mortality records from the 1920s Caribbean were inconsistently maintained and the true number may never be known.

September 1928 meant something different back then. Only about 50,000 people lived in the tri-county South Florida region. The land boom was already fading, yet subdivisions and new communities were still being built. Palm Beach, developed as a resort destination by railroad magnate Henry Flagler and incorporated in 1911, had become a playground for the wealthy. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway had made the region accessible and helped fuel rapid development throughout the early twentieth century. Across Lake Worth in West Palm Beach, working people lived — support staff, service workers, and the laborers who kept the resort economy running.

Landfall came on the evening of September 16, around 6:15 p.m., when the hurricane struck Palm Beach County between Jupiter and Boca Raton. Richard Gray, the Meteorologist in Charge at the Miami Weather Bureau office, had initially believed the storm would recurve northward and miss South Florida. Warnings were ultimately issued from Miami to Titusville, but communications disruption made tracking the center nearly impossible in real time. The eye moved directly over West Palm Beach, then continued northwest inland, carrying devastating winds and a surge of water directly toward the low-lying agricultural communities surrounding Lake Okeechobee. At landfall, the storm's central pressure was approximately 929 millibars, one of the lowest ever recorded for a Florida hurricane at the time.

Impact on West Palm Beach and the Coast

Coastal Palm Beach County sustained severe damage, especially in the Jupiter area where the eyewall persisted longest because of where the storm crossed the coastline. A storm surge of around 10 feet, with waves likely reaching as high as 20 feet, crashed into the barrier islands including Palm Beach.

The strongest winds in the eyewall affected northern Palm Beach County, particularly the vicinity of Jupiter. At the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse, the mortar was reportedly squeezed "like toothpaste" from between the bricks during the storm, swaying the tower 17 inches off its base. Captain Seabrook, the lighthouse keeper, and his son Franklin worked to keep the light burning after electricity failed. When the generator quit, they hand-cranked the light's mantle through the worst of it. Six fatalities occurred west of Jupiter after a school where people had taken shelter collapsed under the force of the wind.

Well-issued hurricane warnings meant many coastal residents had prepared. Only 26 deaths were recorded in the coastal Palm Beach area. Still, the destruction was staggering in scope. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Hollywood suffered only minor damage, but the area surrounding West Palm Beach witnessed the destruction of more than 1,700 homes and several million dollars in property damage. Eighteen inches of rain fell in 24 hours across the region on September 16 and into September 17.

The Lake Okeechobee Flood

While West Palm Beach suffered severe wind and water damage along the coast, catastrophic loss of life was unfolding to the west. As the hurricane traveled over the lake, its winds shifted from northerly to southerly, sloshing the shallow lake's waters first against the southern dikes, then against the northern ones. The meager earthen dikes, built of dried mud and fill and never engineered for a storm of this magnitude, failed on both sides, sending floodwaters rushing out in all directions.

Strong winds had already piled water against the south end of the lake as the storm moved inland. The lake's water level was already three feet higher than normal on September 16 due to heavy rains in the preceding weeks. Residents had been notified of the approaching storm that day, and many evacuated. But when the storm appeared to be arriving later than expected, a number of people returned home, believing the danger had passed. That decision cost thousands their lives.

The breach was catastrophic. Water several feet deep spread over an area approximately 6 miles wide and 75 miles long around the lake's southern end, consuming the towns of Pahokee, Canal Point, Chosen, Belle Glade, and South Bay within hours. The flood struck at night, in the dark, with almost no warning for those who had returned. Survivors were still being found wandering the flooded areas as late as September 22. Because Lake Okeechobee sat in an isolated interior region, it took three days before substantial government aid arrived. The difficult terrain and slowly receding floodwaters made the search for bodies grueling work. Some bodies weren't recovered until six weeks after the storm.

The majority of the dead were Black and non-white migrant farm workers who had little warning, fewer resources to evacuate, and no meaningful infrastructure protection. Three-quarters or more of those who died in the flood were non-white field workers. Around $25 million in total damages resulted from the hurricane. Adjusted for population, wealth, and inflation, that figure is estimated at approximately $16 billion in present-day terms.

Racial Inequity in the Aftermath

The response to the hurricane's dead revealed the deep racial fault lines running through West Palm Beach and Palm Beach County in 1928. Between 1,800 and 4,000 men, women, and children died in the flood, with researchers in recent decades arguing that official figures significantly undercounted Black casualties because many victims were migrant workers with no local records and no one to report them missing. Roughly 75 percent of the dead were Black, making this one of the deadliest natural disasters to impact African Americans and Afro-Bahamians in United States history.

Reflecting the racial and class discrimination of that era, authorities reserved the few available caskets for white victims. White victims received formal burial service, though in a mass grave, at Woodlawn Cemetery in downtown West Palm Beach. In all, 69 white victims were interred there. That site received a timely memorial. Approximately 674 Black victims were buried in a separate mass grave in the city's pauper's burial field at Tamarind Avenue and 25th Street. Black corpses were stacked in piles, doused in fuel oil, and burned before authorities bulldozed the remains into the unmarked grave. That site was later sold for private industrial use, serving successively as a garbage dump, a slaughterhouse, and a sewage treatment plant. Many historians and advocates have characterized this sequence as a deliberate erasure of the Black dead.

A second burial site existed at Port Mayaca, in Martin County on the northeast shore of Lake Okeechobee, where an estimated 1,600 to 1,800 additional victims were interred in a mass grave. That site was maintained by the state and eventually marked, though it drew far less public attention for decades than the Woodlawn site in West Palm Beach.

Two memorial services were held on Sunday, September 30, 1928. They were separate. One was for white victims, the other for non-white victims, held simultaneously at different locations in West Palm Beach. A contemporary Miami Herald account reported nearly 1,000 victims in the immediate area, 674 of whom were identified as non-white. Two thousand people attended the ceremonies at the pauper's cemetery, where noted Black educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune read the Mayor's proclamation. That the most prominent voice at the Black memorial was a nationally known figure like Bethune underscored how seriously Black communities regarded the storm's victims, even as official institutions did not.

The storm's impact on Black life around Lake Okeechobee entered American literary history through Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which contains a vivid fictional account of the hurricane and its aftermath. While a work of fiction, the novel is based directly on Hurston's own research and experience in the Everglades region and is frequently cited in historical scholarship on the storm's cultural legacy.

Memorialization and Long-Term Legacy

Recovery and reconstruction of West Palm Beach began almost immediately after the storm. October 1928 alone saw permits for repair work exceeding $2 million approved for Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, with the latter issuing 3,165 permits for building and major repairs between October 1 and June 30, 1929.

Inland communities fared far worse. Some towns along the shores of Lake Okeechobee slowly rebuilt. Belle Glade, for instance, saw its population grow during the Great Depression as workers sought employment in agriculture and natural resource industries. Other localities never recovered at all. Chosen, Fruitcrest, and Okeelanta effectively ceased to exist as functioning communities.

The storm also prompted major and lasting changes in flood control infrastructure across South Florida. Between 1932 and 1938, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a massive earthen structure around Lake Okeechobee that would eventually be dedicated as the Herbert Hoover Dike. The dike stretches 143 miles around the lake and was built directly in response to the 1928 disaster, with the intent of preventing another catastrophic breach. Formation of the Okeechobee Flood Control District followed, to oversee flood control measures across the region. These infrastructure changes fundamentally altered the hydrology of South Florida for generations and remain in active use today, though the dike has faced scrutiny in recent decades over its structural integrity.

Recognition of the Black victims buried in West Palm Beach came much later. Robert Hazard, a West Palm Beach resident, established the Storm of '28 Memorial Park Coalition Inc. to fight for formal recognition of the Black victims. In 2000, the city reacquired the burial site at Tamarind Avenue, and plans for a memorial began in earnest. The site was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2002. A state historical marker was added in 2003 during events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the storm. On the 80th anniversary in 2008, eight years after the city reacquired the land, officials erected a plaque and formal marker at the Tamarind Avenue site. At Woodlawn Cemetery, a stone marker stands today in memory of the 69 white victims buried there.

The Historical Society of Palm Beach County maintains a permanent outdoor exhibit titled The Storm of '28 at the entrance of the 1916 Historic Courthouse in downtown West Palm Beach. It ensures the hurricane remains part of the civic memory of the region.

References

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