CATASTROPHE: Aftermath

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Postlude. The gentle winds that languished over the Caribbean and Florida last week played a melancholy postlude to the doomsday wind-music of the week before. There were fervid, efficient rescue workers in Florida, Porto Rico, Guadeloupe and the smaller West Indian islands. They performed emergency miracles. But everywhere they looked they saw twisted wreckage, bruised crops and foliage, substance for a long, necessarily patient renascence. And in the lush Everglades of Florida were corpses in piles, other corpses floating in ooze, while greedy buzzards spiralled overhead.

Florida. The carnage in Florida came as a surprise to those who read the early reports. With the hurricane, centering at West Palm Beach, the barometer dropped to 27.57, believed to be the lowest reading ever recorded in the U. S. During the first frenzied days of relief work the death total reached at least 1,500. Unnumbered thousands were injured, 15,000 were homeless, and property losses of $50,000,000 or even $75,000,000 seemed likely.

The seacoast cities of West Palm Beach, Palm Beach, Lake Worth, Delray, Boynton, Jupiter and Stuart were glutted with wreckage. At Palm Beach many fastidiously designed homes (Stotesbury, Wanamaker, Frazier) became ugly shards of architecture. The seaside Royal Poinciana, famed hostelry of social idlers, was totally wrecked. The Breakers, newer, more substantial, lost the roofs of its north and south wings. But on the seacoast few lives were lost.

It was not so inland. Fifty miles west of Palm Beach lies Lake Okeechobee in the tangled Everglades. It is 45 miles long. The surrounding country is lower than the lake and is protected by dikes. There are hundreds of small farms, sugar cane fields, blackamoor shacks. During the hurricane Lake Okeechobee burst the dikes. The rich land became a morass; in certain places water rose to the height of 10 feet. Hundreds, mostly Negroes, were drowned. Relief workers found the water filled with floating bodies, so decomposed that skin color was no longer determinable. One surviving family had lived on peanuts for three days. Throughout the whole region the air was noxious with fumes of decay. Immediate cremation of the dead was ordered. Quarantine of the entire district was imminent. It was a nauseous vale of murk and putrescence.