The 1906 Florida Keys Hurricane

The eighth tropical storm of the 1906 Atlantic hurricane season formed in the far southwestern Caribbean on October 8th, about 500 miles east of the Nicaraguan coast. It would move inland over Nicaragua and move across Honduras over the next few days, before emerging off the north coast of Honduras on the 12th. It made a brief passage over water, before making landfall again in Belize on the 13th. It skimmed along the coast of Belize before moving back over the water on the 16th and turning to the northeast.

In the Florida Keys, crews were working on Henry Morrison Flagler’s Overseas Railroad to Key West. Flagler had built a series of opulent resorts all along the East Coast of Florida, all connected by his Florida East Coast Railway. The massive project connecting Key West with the mainland had begun in 1903.

On the evening of October 17, 1906, crews settled into their houseboats along the project, despite warnings from local residents that a bad storm was on the way. The category three hurricane, packing top winds of 120 mph, was making a quick cut across Cuba, just to the east of Havana. It was less than 150 miles south southwest of Key West.

One of the flatboats was ripped from its moorings at Long Key about 7:30 a.m. on the 18th and swept out to sea where the boat was smashed to pieces, drowning over one hundred workers. More workers died when another steamer sank. Over 130 FEC workers were killed by the hurricane. Overseas Railroad would finally be completed in 1912.

The tragedy was eerily predictive of the deadly 1935 Labor Day Hurricane which caught hundreds of veterans working on the Overseas Highway. That series of roads and bridges would link Lower Matecumbe Key with No Name Key and parallel the FEC from Miami to Key West.

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