An Eye 40 Miles Wide: Inside the Great Miami Hurricane

Nearly a century after it struck, the Great Miami Hurricane remains, by one important measure, the single most expensive hurricane in American history. Not because of what it cost in 1926, but because of what an identical storm would cost if it struck the same coastline today. Few storms in U.S. history illustrate so clearly how much a hurricane's sheer size can matter.

An Unusually Massive Storm

The 1926 hurricane formed off the coast of Africa in early September and tracked west-northwest across the Atlantic for more than a week before reaching South Florida, plenty of time and open water for it to grow into an enormous system. By the time it approached the Bahamas, its eye alone measured 30 to 40 miles wide, and its hurricane-force winds extended across roughly 150 miles of coastline.

That size, more than its top wind speed, is what made the storm so destructive. A wider hurricane pushes far more ocean water toward shore than a smaller, more compact one, meaning its impact wasn't confined to a single city. Hurricane-force winds stretched from the Upper Florida Keys north through Broward and Palm Beach counties all the way to St. Lucie County, turning what might have been a Miami disaster into a region-wide catastrophe.