Last Train to Paradise (19 page)

Unfortunately, however, these men were not being supervised by the Keys-seasoned and wary FEC project engineers, but by officials of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, bureaucrats who had relatively little knowledge of what they were getting into. The three work camps that had been established (from Windley Key, MM 86, down to the end of Lower Matecumbe, MM 73) were not the sturdy, reinforced barracks of the FEC, but were comprised primarily of tents and flimsy temporary buildings that could easily be taken down and moved along as the crushed-coral roadbed progressed down the Keys. Certainly anyone working on the Keys would have a glimmering of what dangers a hurricane posed, but there was no Meredith or Krome in charge, and no longer any well-worked-out contingency plan in place.

Worse yet were those preliminary Weather Bureau reports downplaying the threat of the storm. Headlines in the Sunday edition of the
Miami Herald
made no mention of the impending storm:
MIAMI TO OBSERVE LABOR DAY HOLIDAY
was its blithe banner, with the subhead “Program Includes Parade, Sports, Picnic and Addresses.” The forecast called for showers later that day, and “probably” for Monday as well. There was concern, then, in the highway work camps, but it was not great concern, for no one there could possibly have imagined what was about to happen.

Because it was a holiday weekend, and those who could afford it might well have been expected to have fled the work camps for the pleasures of Key West or Miami, some difference of opinion exists as to just how many of the 684 men assigned to the building of the highway were in those tents and shanties on that fateful Monday, but everyone agrees that there were hundreds still there. And now that the winds were rising, the rain had begun, and the whitecaps had begun to cover the island, the men were desperate for the arrival of that promised rescue train.

It was nearing 8:00
P.M.
when Old 447 approached the Islamorada station on Upper Matecumbe Key (MM 82), but there had been no power to feed the building lights or approach signals for hours now. With waves sweeping over the seven-foot-high right-of-way and the wind-whipped sheets of rain intense, Haycraft was literally traveling blind.

Even once he spotted the group awaiting him, Haycraft was not quick to bring 447 to a stop. Understandably, the refugees had gathered in the lee of a cluster of buildings—the station house, the post office, and a warehouse—but Haycraft sensed that the winds might bring everything crashing down upon them at any moment.

Despite the frantic cries of the refugees who thought he was passing them by, Haycraft kept his hand on the throttle until 447 had passed more than a quarter of a mile beyond the station, at a point where the landmass was widest, and no buildings teetered overhead. “I think now that if I had stopped it at any other point, the train would now lie at the bottom of the ocean,” Haycraft told a
Miami News
reporter.

There he waited while the pathetic figures chased down the track in his wake, dimly lit by the engine’s headlamp, arms waving desperately. They’d been screaming with everything they had, imploring Haycraft to stop, but no human voice could overcome the engine’s noise or the awful, unending roar of the storm.

“It’s very difficult to imagine what it was like to be in two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds,” says John Hope, Tropical Weather Expert for The Weather Channel. “Of course, it would just tear all substandard structures apart, they couldn’t stand up, and a person couldn’t stand up, either. I expect they had to crawl to try to get on the train because the wind was just enormous. Very difficult to breathe, a lot of sand blowing around in their faces, it was just unbelievable.”

For five minutes after he had brought his engine to a halt, Haycraft watched men, women, and children struggling past his cab to the passenger cars, where crewmen pulled them frantically aboard. In that brief time, it might have seemed that there was hope, that all his efforts could lead to some small victory, but that was when he felt that terrible rumbling beneath his feet and stared out at the impossible tidal wall bearing down.

Records indicate that the system was indeed a small one, with an eye no more than eight miles wide, and principal storm bands perhaps thirty miles across. But its compact size is also what gave the storm its legendary strength.

No wind-speed-measuring instruments survived, but subsequent engineering analysis of the damage left behind suggested that gusts inside that tightly packed circle ranged from 150 miles per hour at its onset to over 200 on the storm’s trailing edge. Some experts have argued that gusts could have reached 250 miles per hour in some pockets of the storm, and they like to point out that the barometric readings that were taken at the fringes of the storm were of levels normally found inside the cones of tornadoes.

According to Keys historian Jerry Wilkinson, the legendary barometric reading of 26.35, which lends further credence to the wind-speed estimates, was recorded not at a weather station but by Captain Ivan Olsen, who rode out the storm off the coast of the Matecumbes in his boat. Though the readings had fallen off the scale of Olsen’s barometer, he used a knife to mark the brass faceplate as the mercury continued falling. Though at times the towering waves threatened to swamp his craft, causing Olsen to wonder if the markings would constitute a posthumous record of his hellish night, his battered craft held together, and scientists were able to calibrate the readings in the aftermath.

Most feel that the tidal surge that swept up out of the ocean that evening was eighteen to twenty feet high, though the September 1935 issue of the
Monthly Weather Review
suggests a more chilling possibility:

“The track and crossties of the railroad were in one stretch washed off a concrete viaduct thirty feet above ordinary water level. . . .” In any case, “reports agreed in the description of the great rapidity with which the rise of the sea came in from the southern side of the Keys as a ‘wall of water’. . . .”

The winds were so strong that the waters covering the shallow reef were in fact being displaced, an ocean literally picked up and swept ashore—or what had been shore. The mighty wave fed upon itself, doubling and redoubling in size, until it had become a thundering, otherworldly mass that could dwarf an entire island, and swallow a train as if it were nothing at all.

Subsequent inquiries have suggested that the rescue train was intended for dispatch from Miami on Sunday, the day before the storm hit, and was to have remained on standby in Homestead, with a crew at the ready, in case it should be needed for a quick dash down to Marathon, no more than an hour away. But bureaucratic snafus in Washington prevented arrangements from being finalized with the railroad offices in Miami.

By the time the gravity of the situation was apparent and the frantic SOS went out on Monday at 2:35
P.M.
—from a frantic work-camp supervisor in Islamorada—railroad crews had dispersed for the holiday, and the delays in assembling a train became inevitable.

Little of that mattered to J. J. Haycraft, of course, as the hellish winds howled and the terrible “wall of water” rushed toward him. What he was experiencing was beyond imagination, beyond anyone’s power to prepare for.

He opened his throttle wide, in a desperate attempt to save the human cargo he had on board, but nature had other plans. The engine lurched forward only a few feet before it shuddered to a halt. The train’s conductor, J. F. Gamble, flung himself into the cab, his uniform soaked and dripping, to report the worst: one of the hundred-ton boxcars at the rear of the train had been toppled by the wind and waves, automatically locking the air brakes on the entire chain. They were frozen in place, then, as the tidal surge advanced. And as far as Haycraft could envision, they were all as good as dead.

Survivors at the fringes of the storm told chilling tales of men disemboweled by jagged sheets of roofing torn loose by the wind, of skulls crushed by fifteen-pound boulders flying through the air like pebbles. The darkness was often interrupted by strange flashes of “ground lightning” a phenomenon generated by the wind lifting millions of sand granules into the air, where their clashing created eerie static charges. “It was as if millions of fireflies were swarming,” one witness said.

Deadly fireflies, in this instance. Some victims who could not find shelter were later found where they had been pinned against piles of debris, their faces literally blasted down to bone by the driving sand.

Melton Jarrell, the workman from Camp 5, located near MM 79, who’d had his leg pinned by a thousand-pound section of rail and was ready to cut his own foot off to escape drowning, had passed out from pain and shock before he could carry out his gruesome plan. When he awakened, he realized that the tidal surge that had dropped the rail on his leg had now somehow managed to free him from his trap. It might have been a welcome realization, had he not found himself being swept out to sea.

He was tumbling through wind-whipped waves, his efforts to swim in the powerful currents nothing but a waste of energy. What kind of luck had he had? he was thinking. In the next moment he felt himself crash against something hard, then felt an impact at his head. Finally there was darkness once again.

Lloyd Fitchett, who’d been quartered in Camp 1, some seven miles north of Jarrell, on Windley Key, had run to the railroad embankment, hoping to escape the rising waters. “Buddies all around were shouting in panic,” he told reporters. “ ‘Give me a hand, buddy. Save me. I’m drowning.’ These were mingled with the groans from men already too far gone to cry aloud. I fought hard to keep my head out of water and inch by inch managed to creep to higher ground.”

When he found a telephone pole, Fitchett climbed as high as he could above the rising waters. “I took my belt off and strapped myself to it. I heard a swishing noise, then a shriek, and realized I had been hit by flying debris. I learned later it was the roof of the barracks that had fallen on my chest. A barrage of stones kept hitting me all over the body and then I partly lost consciousness. I hung on through the night in a semi-dazed condition and when daybreak came I could see the bodies of my dead comrades all around me. I counted fifteen.”

Witnesses reported seeing a roof lift up whole from one house on Windley Key, flying off in the next instant as if it were a hat tossed by a careless giant. Moments later the walls of the house collapsed, disappearing before an onrushing tidal surge. Sofas, chairs, tables, and household goods of all sorts churned by in the raging current, followed by, of all things, a
piano.

As if that sight were not bizarre enough, onlookers realized that there was a desperate woman draped over the piano’s leading edge, her arms clutching as if she’d meant to keep her most prized possession from being carried away. As they gaped, woman and piano rushed by at incredible speed, hurtling two hundred yards inland before the furniture-bearing breaker finally crashed down. The wave broke against the railroad embankment, and the massive piano fell atop the body of its owner, crushing her.

J. E. Duane, the caretaker of the FEC’s Long Key Fishing Camp, described his own fight for survival to reporters for the
Key West Citizen
:

By nine-thirty that evening, waters had risen to nearly twenty feet on the seaward side of the island, and the house where he and other employees had taken shelter seemed ready to collapse. During an unexpected lull, Duane and a coworker ventured out onto the porch of the house, where they were astonished to find the skies above them clear, the winds gentle, the stars shining brightly.

The calm seemed impossible, but soon enough, Duane realized that it was only the eye of the storm passing over them. As he and his companion made a dash for a more solid-looking structure on higher ground sixty feet or so away, the winds resumed as abruptly as if a switch had been thrown, only this time with even greater force. Before they could make it to the other house, Duane and his companion found themselves swimming through waist-deep water.

Even as others in the house dragged them inside, the waters followed, flattening doors, pouring through shattered windows, rising to chest level within moments, and threatening to tear the entire structure off its foundations and out to sea.

Among those trapped in the building were four infant children. For more than half an hour, while the water rose, the men among the group held the children aloft to keep them from drowning, praying all the while for the storm to end.

Jay Barnes, author of
Florida’s Hurricane History,
recounts this chilling, moment-by-moment account of the Weather Bureau’s observer on Long Key:

“10:15
P.M.
—The first blast from SSW, full force. House now breaking up. . . . I glanced at barometer which read 26.98 inches, dropped it in water, and was blown outside into sea; got hung up in broken fronds of coconut tree and hung on for dear life. I was then struck by some object and knocked unconscious.

“Sept. 3: 2:25
A.M.
—I became conscious in tree and found I was lodged about 20 feet above ground. All water had disappeared from island; the cottage had been blown back on the island, from whence the sea receded and left it with all people safe.”

That cottage was the very one where J. E. Duane had run for shelter, hours before, and where those four children had been held aloft by men and women who sobbed and cursed and prayed for deliverance. In one case at least, they had been successful.

The weatherman and the others inside the cottage were among the lucky ones, and so, as it turns out, was Melton Jarrell, who cheated death a second time that night. He was plucked unconscious from the top of a thirty-foot tree at the bay’s edge, where the great tidal surge had left him.

The fates would not be quite so kind to J. J. Haycraft and his stalled rescue train, however. Engine 447 was a workhorse, built in Schenectady, New York, in the 1920s, designed for duty and not for grace. At just over 320,000 pounds, the engine gripped its rails as if the gravity of Jupiter were pressing upon it (imagine four Cadillac automobiles parked end to end, then piled twenty high; next, imagine that eighty-car stack crushed down to the height of a Greyhound bus, and you get some idea of the density). Still, as the water wall slammed down, Haycraft felt as if he were being tossed through frothing rapids in a birch-bark canoe.