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Sebring Farms
September 16, 1928

     It was dark. Sixty-three people were trapped in a coffin-like air pocket in the cramped attic, one on top of the other. A flashlight would come on then quickly be turned off to conserve the batteries. Except for two small vents at each end of the attic, there was no other opening but the trap door down to the raging waters. The house trembled as the water tried to lift it off its foundation. They had to make ready to escape. There was only one way out - through the roof.

 

 
       September 16, 1928
       The night 2,500 people died. 

 

 

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Coffins piled up along the Pahokee road near the Hillsboro Canal

 


South Bay Barge
     With her stomach inflated by her unborn baby, Maribell had to carry herself higher than the others, exposing her body to the furious wind. She fought each gust as they crawled forward along the lock wall until she could go no further. Fighting each gust, Lee turned to her and yelled over his shoulder, "Get on my back."

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The "cemetery detail" transporting bodies in a truck
     Carefully, lifting one hand at a time, she wrapped her arms around his neck.   Sheets of cold hard rain slapped their faces. Lee desperately grabbed onto the lock wall, digging his fingers into the slippery wet planks. Slowly he pulled the two of them along. Finally, they reached the edge of the lock where they were able to leap, one by one, into the pitching quarter-boat barge, which had drifted back close to the wall. 
      Soaked and cold they ducked inside the cabin where the other 200 residents of South Bay were huddled. Maribell broke down and cried. While crawling along the lock wall Maribell heard in the dark, the screams of town’s people being swept away in the current -- cries that would haunt her for her entire life.
 

     Robert Mykle at Lake Okeechobee ("the big-water" in the Seminole language) with airboat operator Jim Challancin, whose father, Mark, rode out the 1928 hurricane on the barge with 200 people at South Bay.

 

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The track of the 1928 hurricane.

Special thanks to the
Glades Historical Society
"I had the unique privilege of interviewing over forty 1928 hurricane survivors, all in their 80s and 90s," Mykle relates. "Killer 'Cane is their story."

To order call National Book Network at 1-800-462-6420
Publisher Coopersquarepress.com

Killer 'Cane
Written by Robert Mykle