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The Great Miami Hurricane at 100: The Storm, the Warnings and “Work or Jail”
Description
One hundred years ago, on September 18, 1926, the Great Miami Hurricane struck a booming, vulnerable South Florida and permanently changed the region’s history.
Meteorology Matters reconstructs the storm, the uncertain forecasts and the public confusion surrounding its arrival—including the tropical system that had brought flooding only days earlier and the newspaper headlines that finally warned South Florida a hurricane might be approaching.
But this anniversary is about more than wind, water and destruction. The episode examines what happened after the hurricane, when Miami’s Black community faced discrimination, unequal treatment and demands to perform dangerous recovery work under the threat of arrest—the disturbing history remembered as “work or jail.”
How did warning failures, rapid development, racial injustice and an incomplete historical record shape the way the disaster was remembered? And whose experiences were left out of the familiar story?
The episode also introduces 1926Hurricane.com, a major historical project devoted to the hurricane, its victims, survivors, science and lasting consequences. The website makes landfall at 7:00 a.m. Miami time on September 18, exactly 100 years after the hurricane’s official landfall.
Visit https://1926Hurricane.com
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