WPBFD History

broken one and a special commendation for his work. Caesar remembered one call to the Chevrolet dealer- ship at Poinsettia (now South Dixie Highway) and Clare- more during the height of the storm. The truck he drove, a 1926 American La France, had no roof or windshield making it even more difficult to see in the blinding rain. Caesar later commented, "And here we were driving that truck . . . , no windshield . . . , no goggles, against the wind in low gear. Put it to the floorboard and we went up to about three miles an hour, up to that thing. Found out what it was and we just cut off the switch on that alarm, turned around and we just let it come back. The wind blew us back. We just sort of . . . coasted." The eye of the hurricane crossed West Palm Beach causing extensive damage as the winds suddenly shifted to the opposite direction. The fire department was heavily involved in the protection of the citizens as the monster rolled ashore. There were 38 alarms for the month of September, nearly twice as many as the next busiest month of the year. One of the structures demolished in the storm was the department's high pressure pumping station on the lakefront. A more substantial building re- placed it in 1929. More than 1,700 homes and 260 businesses were destroyed in West Palm Beach. An estimated 2,100 fami- lies were left homeless. Property damage was $13.8 mil- lion in West Palm Beach alone. Chief Sadler made the following report to the city commission detailing operations of the Fire Department during the hurricane: During the storm the department answered sixteen (16) calls, two of which were for fire, the remainder being for various causes, such as: removing people from dangerous places to places of safety, assisting citizens in nailing up windows to protect property, removing danger- ous signs, shutting off sprinkler systems, where broken and various different kinds of services. Members of the department were patrolling during the majority of the time the storm was in progress and gave assistance in numbers of cases where no calls were received in the sta- tion. Immediately after the storm, all members were called to constant duty and were on duty twenty-four hours a day until October 1, 1928, except in a few cases where men were allowed to go, for a short time, for the purpose of salvag- ing their own personal belongings and looking after their families. As all telephones in the city were out of order, we were therefore without any means of receiv- ing fire calls other than verbal. To take care of

only ones interested in such things. 1928

By 1928 the population of West Palm Beach was 19,000 and growth continued along the lakefront. The annual budget was nearly $1,000,000, but increasing costs put limitations on what the city could afford. Sadler was not to get his new station and alarm system. The weather had always wreaked havoc with the pioneer settlers in the area, with steaming summers, smothering people to the point of exhaustion. The rainy season brought huge mosquitoes, constantly swarming. Long dry spells baked the ground to dust. The bone- chilling winter freezes that sometimes pushed southward felt even worse because of the high humidity. But one meteorological event was feared worse than any other. At the beginning of September in 1928, the forces of nature were at work in the Atlantic Ocean. First it was little more than a rain squall with brisk winds. Over a period of days, the clouds began to move in a circular pat- tern and the winds gathered strength. As the system moved westerly, nurtured by the warm, open waters of the Atlantic, more circulation developed. The storm steadily intensified, fed by an invisible source. Eventually it transformed into a hurricane that by today's standards would be listed a category 5, the most severe rating given these massive clouds of destruction. Its path was deter- mined by natural forces, but those unwarned people of West Palm Beach must have thought that the devil him- self had found his way to town. Sunday morning, September 16, 1928, large bands of dark clouds whipped across the coastal skies. Then the monster storm surged into Palm Beach and West Palm Beach with all its fury. By 2:00 in the afternoon the winds had reached gale force. Frightened families huddled to- gether in their homes as the demon knocked at every wall, trying to gain entry. Winds were estimated at 160 miles per hour as the storm wall passed over the city that eve- ning at 8:00. The lowest barometric pressure ever recorded to that date (27.43) was taken by a West Palm Beach fire- man as the hurricane raged. Driver/Engineer Charles F. Caesar, who monitored meteorological equipment for the weather bureau as an Airways Weather Observer, was on duty at South Borough Fire Station as the winds gusted. At one point Caesar noticed an arm of his wind speed gauge bending; it had just registered a 145 mile per hour gust. When power was lost Caesar ingeniously hooked- up his equipment to the batteries of a fire engine to con- tinue getting readings. His statistics were some of the few collected during the storm as other weather stations were put completely out of service. The Weather Bureau later presented Caesar with a new anemometer to replace the

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