1926HURRICANE.COM
Miami recorded 1.20 inches of rain in 45 minutes on September 16. By September 17, a wire report described flooded farms in Hialeah and northwest Miami. A separate weak cyclone was fading nearby while the Great Miami Hurricane approached.
NOAA’s HURDAT reanalysis identifies a separate unnamed cyclone as 1926 Storm 6. It crossed Cuba, briefly reached minimal tropical-storm strength near the Bahamas on September 15–16, passed through the Florida Straits during the night of September 16–17, and weakened to a depression.
Richard W. Gray recorded 1.20 inches at Miami in only 45 minutes, from 10:10 to 10:55 a.m. on September 16, and called the rainfall excessive. Thunder returned from 5:48 to 7:55 that evening.
This overlap helps explain why the public story can look confused in retrospect: local rain and inland flooding were already under way while a much more dangerous hurricane was approaching from the southeast. The earlier system’s presence is documented; assigning every flooded field to that cyclone alone would go beyond the evidence.
The report describes residents seeking state action from Governor John W. Martin and Miami’s city manager asking permission to consider a temporary control structure. That is more than background rain: it shows a city trying to manage water moving across a shared agricultural, canal and urban system before hurricane winds arrived.
The report broadens the geography beyond Miami and Hialeah into the canal-and-dike system connecting Broward and the Lake Okeechobee region. It is evidence of regional water-control stress. Until the complete newspaper page is identified, the exhibit does not assign the breach to one cyclone or claim the clipping proves the precise time of failure.
Storm 6 and the Great Miami Hurricane were separate cyclones. NOAA’s revised catalog numbers the weaker system as 6 and the Miami hurricane as 7; the older entries reproduced in the same record use the opposite numbers. A number alone can therefore identify the wrong storm when comparing sources.
Storm 6 crossed Cuba and briefly reached minimal tropical-storm strength near the Bahamas on September 15–16. NOAA found no apparent tropical-storm conditions in southeast Florida from this system. Its presence, Miami’s measured rain and the flood reports overlap in time, but that does not establish that it caused every flood or the undated dike breach.
For a modern reader, the overlapping dates and changing storm numbers make the sequence easy to merge. Establishing what residents understood at the time requires their actual warnings and newspaper accounts.
The 1925 development map and December 1924 aerial view show why “the Everglades” cannot be treated as a distant wilderness in this story. Subdivisions, roads, farms and drainage canals reached west from the coastal ridge into low land. The evidence does not show the marsh physically retreating on its own; it shows people extending the urban and agricultural edge into a landscape whose water had been redirected but not eliminated.
Together these sources establish urban proximity, rapid development and measured rainfall. They do not, by themselves, establish which canal or drainage work caused each reported flood.
The 1976 National Register nomination is later documentation, but it identifies the Everglades Drainage District, the canal builders and the surviving minutes used to reconstruct the system. It also records 1926 as the year shoaling and new road and rail links ended practical boat traffic through Lock No. 1.