Belle Glade, Fla. – One of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history happened in this farming community beside Lake Okeechobee, and for people here, the Hurricane of 1928 is an inescapable piece of city lore.
A prominent statue at the city’s crossroads depicts a family running from the floodwaters that gushed through the lake’s dike, and the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” hitched literary fame to the disaster that claimed more than 2,000 lives.
But people had always assumed the danger was long past.
Now engineers hired by a state agency are reporting that weaknesses in the dike again pose a “grave and imminent danger to the people and the environment of South Florida.”
Every year, according to engineers, the dike has a 1 in 6 chance of failing.
“I was stunned – for all these years, there’s been no red flag ever raised, then this report comes out,” said Commissioner Warren Newell, who represents Palm Beach County on a board covering the lake area. “Now we’re running around trying to get evacuation plans in place, mobilize equipment and find shelters for thousands of people.”
About 40,000 people live around Lake Okeechobee, one of the nation’s largest freshwater lakes. Preventing the communities from being overwhelmed is the Herbert Hoover Dike, constructed of gravel, rock, limestone sand and shell dredged from the lake. Much of it was built in the 1930s. And it leaks.
Portions of the dike “bear a striking resemblance to Swiss cheese,” according to the report, which extensively cites Army Corps of Engineers documents.
Those gaps and seepages of lake water lead to erosion in the dike and potentially, disaster.
