STORM OF THE CENTURY

Journalist Drye debuts with an engrossingly told, sorry story of a hurricane that killed hundreds of men working on a federal construction project.

FDR’s Works Progress Administration, established to boost employment during the Depression, in one of its programs hired WWI veterans to build bridges connecting the islands of the Florida Keys. The vets were a rough bunch—“shell-shocked, whiskey-shocked and depression-shocked,” in the words of a New York Times reporter who came south to investigate their camps of crummy wooden shacks—who had alienated both the inhabitants of the Keys’ tightly knit, backwater settlements and the New Dealers in Washington funding their paychecks. But they certainly didn't deserve the shellacking they took at the hands of a compact and ferocious hurricane that swept over the Keys on September 2, 1935. As Drye's account reveals, little preparation had been made to evacuate the area by train, and the primitive hurricane warning capabilities of the time meant that the storm’s track was not definitely known until the last minute. A series of poor decisions and predictable snafus resulted in the trains being sent too late, at the cost of 253 veterans’ lives. The author handles with aplomb the tangled bureaucratic shenanigans that left the vets exposed and vividly captures the hurricane’s monstrous energy: it lifted 100-ton railroad cars off the tracks, pushed winds in excess of 160 mph, and sent a storm surge in excess of 20 feet washing straight over many of the Keys. “Some died quickly; others lingered horribly after the hurricane passed and died slowly from thirst and untended injuries,” writes Drye, who adds a final coda charting politicians’ pathetic efforts to make hay from the disaster, as Republicans hoped it would help them unseat Roosevelt and his WPA in the 1936 elections and Democrats wriggled to dodge any culpability.

Crack investigative reporting of a terrible event that could and should have been averted.