The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane: The Deadliest Labor Day in American Weather History

Ninety years of hurricanes have come and gone, and not one has landed on U.S. soil with more raw intensity than the storm that tore through the Florida Keys on Labor Day, 1935. It remains the strongest hurricane ever recorded at landfall in the United States, and the way it was discovered, almost by accident, changed how the country watches for hurricanes to this day.

A Storm Nobody Saw Coming Until It Was Nearly Too Late

By early September 1935, forecasters at the newly created Jacksonville Hurricane Warning Center believed a tropical system moving through the Bahamas was headed toward Cuba. With no satellites, no radar, and no aircraft reconnaissance yet in existence, forecasters had to rely on ship reports and persistence forecasting, essentially assuming a storm would continue on its existing track and speed. Once ships began avoiding the area on official advice, that stream of observations dried up almost entirely.

The forecast turned out to be wrong. On the morning of September 2, a Pan American Airways pilot flying his routine Key West-to-Havana route spotted an ominous cloud mass far north of where the storm was supposed to be. He reported it upon landing, prompting the Cuban National Observatory to send up a military pilot, Captain Leonard Povey, to investigate. Flying an open-cockpit biplane, Povey circled the storm rather than flying into it and confirmed it was tracking toward the Florida Keys, not Cuba.