FLORIDA STRUCK BY HURRICANE

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25607, 23 September 1948, Page 5

FLORIDA STRUCK BY HURRICANE

TWO PERSONS KILLED

DAMAGE REPORTED AT KEY WEST

(Rec. 8 p.m.) NEW YORK, Sept. 21. A hurricane caused two deaths in Miami. A woman was killed by a shock from a broken live wire and a man was blown off the top of a fivestoreyed building. Miami escaped the full force of the hurricane to-night. Key West, 175 miles to the south, was raked by winds up to 160 miles an hour. The chief storm forecaster said that the worst was over for Miami. The hurricane was over land now and it could be expected that it would lose force until it passed over water again. Its present course indicated that it would pass into the Atlantic' in the Daytona Beach area about noon to-morrow. «

Warnings have been extended as far as Charleston, South Carolina.

In Cuba 200 persons were injured and several hundred houses destroyed when the hurricane crossed there last night.

Thousands of residents of Miami took their families to storm shelters or sought safety in the city’s strongest buildings. Rescue officials prepared two special trains at Fort Pierce to evacuate residents of the Everglades area around Lake Okeechobee, where hundreds died in the 1926 hurricane.

The Key West navy base reported that CO commercial and pleasure, craft were destroyed in the hurricane, which was the worst since 1919. The principal damage in the city was to the roofs of business premises and houses. The Navy had not yet been able to determine the damage to its craft and installations.