The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane: The Dead Nobody Counted

On the night of September sixteenth and into September seventeenth, nineteen twenty-eight, Lake Okeechobee's southern dike collapsed.

The lake contains roughly one trillion gallons of water. When the dike gave way, that water moved across the flatlands of Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay in a matter of hours. The towns below the dike had been warned, but the warnings came too late and to too few people. The death toll, by official estimates, ran between two thousand five hundred and three thousand people. No precise count was ever established.

The victims were overwhelmingly Black Bahamian migrant farmworkers and Black Southern laborers who had come to the Okeechobee basin for the sugar and bean harvests. They had no cars. They had no access to higher ground. Many of them were sleeping in the labor camps when the water came.

What happened afterward is the part that took decades to acknowledge. White victims were interred in a marked public cemetery at Port Mayaca. Black victims, whose bodies were collected from the fields in the days and weeks following, were buried in mass graves in a field that the county did not formally designate or mark. The mass grave at Port Mayaca holds an estimated sixteen hundred bodies, and it went without a historical marker for decades after the storm.

Zora Neale Hurston incorporated the hurricane into her nineteen thirty-seven novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her narrator stands in the flood and watches the water move, and the dead move with it. It is the only literary reckoning with the storm's scale that most Americans are likely to encounter.

The nineteen twenty-eight Okeechobee Hurricane is the second-deadliest natural disaster in United States history, after the Galveston storm of nineteen hundred. Most Americans have never heard of it.