Impact
| Rank | Hurricane | Season | Fatalities |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Galveston" | 1900 | 8,000–12,000† |
| 2 | "Okeechobee" | 1928 | 2,500+† |
| 3 | Katrina | 2005 | 1,836 |
| 4 | "Cheniere Caminada" | 1893 | 1,100–1,400* |
| 5 | "Sea Islands" | 1893 | 1,000–2,000† |
| 6 | "Florida Keys" | 1919 | 778 |
| 7 | "Georgia" | 1881 | 700† |
| 8 | Audrey | 1957 | 416 |
| 9 | "Labor Day" | 1935 | 408 |
| 10 | "Last Island" | 1856 | 400† |
While passing through the Bahamas on September 8, the Ward Line steamer, Corydon, struck land and later sank during the storm. The ship was not found until September 11, at which time it was discovered that 27 people on board had drowned while nine others managed to survive after swimming to shore. On the islands, strong winds produced by the hurricane destroyed numerous homes and sank several schooners, leaving many homeless. In the Florida Strait, a Cuban vessel carrying 45 people was stranded during the storm. However, another ship in the area managed to reach the Cuban vessel and rescue all passengers.
A tornado, spawned by the hurricane, struck Goulds, Florida on September 10, moving inland from Biscayne Bay. It caused US$25,000 (1919 dollars) in damage. Of the approximately 600-900 people officially reported killed in the storm, roughly 500 of them were aboard ten ships lost at sea. Damage and casualties on the Texas coast were also severe, in part due to false rumors that the storm had turned north into Louisiana, which warranted taking storm warnings in Corpus Christi down the day before landfall. Though warnings were posted again early the following day, the citizens were ill-prepared when the hurricane made landfall south of the city as a major hurricane; the storm surge was as high as 16 feet (4.9 m).
This large storm spread winds of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) across Miami, Florida, Burrwood, Louisiana, and Galveston, Texas. A total of 1500 cattle were driven off of Padre Island into Laguna Madre. Heavy rains were common across southern Texas, with numerous locations recording 6 inches (150 mm) to 12 inches (300 mm) of rainfall within 24 hours, which set daily rainfall records. The death toll in Texas was officially 286, but may have been as high as 600.
Read more about this topic: 1919 Florida Keys Hurricane
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)