The 1926 and 1928 Hurricanes and the Building of the Herbert Hoover Dike

By the 1920s, farm towns like Moore Haven, Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay had grown up on the drained land south of Lake Okeechobee. A low levee built of muck separated them from the lake. Two hurricanes showed how dangerous that arrangement was.

1926: Moore Haven

The Great Miami Hurricane of September 1926 drove the lake's water against the levee at Moore Haven. The muck dike gave way and floodwaters swept through the town. Hundreds of people died there, in addition to the deaths in Miami.

1928: the Okeechobee hurricane

Two years later, in September 1928, a stronger storm pushed a surge out of the lake and across the farm towns on its southern shore. Estimates of the death toll range from about 1,800 to more than 3,000; it remains one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. history. Many of the victims were Black farmworkers, including many from the Bahamas, and many were buried in mass graves. Zora Neale Hurston later wrote about the storm in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The federal government steps in

Florida created the Okeechobee Flood Control District in 1929, and Congress authorized federal flood-control work. Between 1930 and 1937, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a much larger levee along the lake's southern shore, with a shorter section on the north. It was later named the Herbert Hoover Dike after the president who visited the area after the storm.

A dike that encircles the lake

Over the following decades the dike was extended until it almost completely surrounded Lake Okeechobee, about 143 miles in all. Concerns about seepage and erosion led to a major rehabilitation program. In early 2023, after about 18 years of work and roughly $1.5 billion, the Corps and its partners marked the completion of that repair effort.

The dike made the lake towns safer, but it also cut Lake Okeechobee off from the Everglades it once overflowed into, a change restoration planners are still working around today.

Remembering the victims

For decades, the 1928 hurricane's toll on Black migrant workers received little public recognition. In recent years memorials and community efforts have worked to honor them, including at the site of a mass grave in West Palm Beach. Belle Glade and other lake towns also hold memorials to the storm.

Why the lake was so dangerous

Lake Okeechobee is large but shallow. Strong hurricane winds can push its water toward one shore, piling it up like water in a tilted pan. With only low earthen levees between the lake and the towns, that "wind tide" spilled over and spread across miles of flat farmland, leaving people little high ground to escape to.

A dike with tradeoffs

The Herbert Hoover Dike protects people, but it also changed the lake. Water managers must keep levels within a range that protects the dike's safety. During wet periods, that means releasing large volumes of water east through the St. Lucie Canal and west through the Caloosahatchee River, which can harm those estuaries. During droughts, the lake can drop low enough to stress its own ecosystem and water supply.

Connecting the past to today

Many modern Everglades restoration projects, including new storage reservoirs, are designed partly to give water managers more options than "release it east or west." In that sense, the decisions made after 1928 still shape where water goes, and why restoring flow south toward the Everglades matters so much.