18. The Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928
The only major hurricane to impact the United States during the 1928 season made up for the shortage of storms that year with its exceptional ferocity. Before making landfall on the American mainland it had already killed almost 2,000 people in the Caribbean islands. Its landfall on the mainland took place on September 17, at West Palm Beach, with the storm carrying sustained winds of 145 mph. It created a storm surge at Lake Okeechobee which flooded hundreds of square miles, putting some communities under twenty feet of water, and drowning more than 2,500 residents of towns such as Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay.
The storm then adopted a curving course, returned to the Atlantic, and made another landfall on the United States at Edisto in South Carolina, below Charleston, and though its winds had by then lessened to 85 mph it was still a deadly storm. The aftermath of the massive storm, which in total killed over 4,000 people, 2,500 of them in the United States, led to numerous flood control projects along the affected coastline. By far the majority of American deaths were in the communities flooded by Lake Okeechobee, and the state of Florida took steps to improve building codes and created the Lake Okeechobee Flood Control District, which worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to create a system to prevent similar disasters.