SWFL.io - Local NewsAnchor: Amanda Hall | Meteorologist: Katie Walls || WINK Investigates Producer: Robin Wolf || Editor: Matthew Hensley
•9/18/2026
MOORE HAVEN, Fla. — A century ago, families were building their lives along the southwestern edge of Lake Okeechobee.
Moore Haven was a young, growing community — a place described by one historian as the first city around Lake Okeechobee. At the time, it was considered a vibrant town, with banks, a hotel and businesses serving a growing population.
Then came Sept. 18, 1926.
A powerful hurricane had already devastated Miami before crossing the state. But its destruction did not end there.
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Hurricane-force winds pushed water from the southern end of Lake Okeechobee toward Moore Haven. The lake was held back by only a small embankment.
The water rose over it, pouring into the town and surrounding area.
Within minutes, a disaster was unfolding that would forever change Moore Haven and the families who lived there.
“Water is what killed everybody here,” said Donnie Lundy, whose grandparents lived through the storm.
The hurricane would become known as the Great Miami Hurricane. For the people around Lake Okeechobee, however, the defining memory was the water.
The full story of the 1926 hurricane survives largely through the families who lived through it and those who came after them.
Pat Lukens, 92, grew up hearing stories about her parents, who had homesteaded in rural Glades County.
Her father, she said, was a storyteller.
When Lukens was a child, her father took her on horseback to see the homestead where her parents had built their life.
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The house had been constructed from lumber purchased from a sawmill. Her parents had to build the home and fence their 180 acres as part of the homesteading process.
Then came the hurricane.
Lukens said her father had driven a Model T truck to Miami to deliver chickens. On his way home, the storm caught him.
He stopped at a service station to fill his truck with gasoline.
“As he pulled into the service station, the roof flew off the service station,” Lukens recalled. “He looked in his rearview mirror and saw like a wall of water coming down the road in back of him.”
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He kept driving, praying he had enough gas to make it home.
His wife was home alone.
“She was petrified,” Lukens said.
Her mother stood in the doorway, believing that if the house collapsed, she might be able to escape more easily from the doorway.
The house held.
Lukens said her parents rode out the storm together and were grateful to have survived.
For people living around Lake Okeechobee in 1926, there was little technology to tell them what was coming.
“There was no warning in those days,” Lundy said.
His grandfather, Ed Lundy, was Moore Haven's city electrician. The town had recently received a siren, but it had never been used. It was still in its crate.
Lundy said his grandfather wired it up and got it working so he could warn the town. But he could not save his own family.
His father, stepmother and three half-siblings lived across the river. Lundy had tried to convince them to come back to Moore Haven, but they refused.
Then the bridge washed out. They were trapped.
Lundy said the three children — Jackson, 4; Jefferson, 2½; and Joshua, 18 days old — died along with their parents.
One child's remains were not found for months. Another was never found.
The floodwaters turned homes, roads and the countryside into a dangerous landscape.
For some, survival meant finding something strong enough to hold onto.
Cypress trees became lifelines.
Larry Luckey recalled the story of two young sisters who climbed into a cypress tree after their parents were swept away.
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The girls, 7 and 8 years old, held onto the tree as the water rose around them.
They survived.
“That's why she said to this day I don't want nobody cutting a cypress tree,” Luckey said.
W.E. Daniel also found himself clinging to a cypress tree.
His granddaughter, Diane Strickland, said Daniel went across the road to free a calf tied to a tree. He became caught in the tree and could not return home.
Inside the house, his wife and two children were trapped by the rising water.
Strickland said her grandmother held her father above the floodwaters as the family stood on a built-in bookcase.
Floodwaters rose over their heads, but an air pocket near the ceiling allowed them to breathe.
Daniel could not see his family from the tree. They could see him.
The next morning, he returned to find them alive.
Hundreds of people died as floodwaters swept through Moore Haven and the surrounding area.
A Red Cross report puts the town's death toll at 300, which was 40% of the town's population, but the true number is believed to be much higher.
Some victims were buried at Ortona Cemetery. Others were never identified and buried in mass graves in Ortona and Sebring.
Vance Storter was 9 years old when the hurricane struck. In archival footage shared by his great-grandson, Storter recalled seeing bodies brought into the area after the storm.
“Most of them were decomposed and some of them you couldn't identify,” Storter said.
Bodies were taken by boat when possible. As conditions deteriorated, some were buried in mass graves and others were burned, according to accounts passed down through families.
Miller Couse, whose family survived the storm, said his aunt, Bertha Graham, was 26 years old and worked at a local bank.
After the hurricane, one of her jobs was identifying bodies.
“She knew everybody, probably knew everybody,” Couse said.
The Cottrell family was among those lost.
Couse said a father, mother and three children were caught in the storm while trying to reach Moore Haven. The father and son survived, but his wife and two daughters died.
Amid the destruction, there were also stories of survival.
In the aftermath, help came from Sebring.
Somewhere in the floodwaters, rescuers found a baby girl alive.
Ned Hancock said his grandfather told him that people traveled by train and found the baby floating on a door.
Pat Lukens said the baby had no one with her.
When the train reached Sebring, people asked residents to care for her while they searched for her parents.
They never found them.
An attorney named Fax Haskins and his wife took the child in and raised her.
They named her Juanita. Her nickname was Nita.
“She had no one with her,” Pat Lukens said. “They never found her parents.”
The 1926 storm would not be the last deadly hurricane to strike communities around Lake Okeechobee.
Just two years later, another powerful hurricane crossed South Florida.
This time, communities on the other side of the lake were devastated.
In Belle Glade, Patrick Burke's grandfather gathered with family and friends inside his home.
Nineteen people were inside.
When the dike broke, floodwaters swept the house away.
Burke said all but two of the people inside were killed.
In just two years, two hurricanes exposed the danger facing communities built around Lake Okeechobee.
The storms helped lead to one of the most significant flood-control efforts in Florida history: the development of a massive system of levees and flood protection.
That system would eventually become the Herbert Hoover Dike.
Leigh Woodham, director of the Clewiston Museum, said the community appealed to lawmakers for help after the disasters.
“They wrote to their congressmen and their senators, pleading for help,” Woodham said.
The federal government eventually funded flood-control improvements through the Army Corps of Engineers.
The barrier around Lake Okeechobee changed.
So did something just as important — the ability to know what is coming.
A century later, the stories remain.
They live in handwritten accounts, old photographs, newspaper articles, archival footage and the memories passed from grandparents to children and grandchildren.
For the descendants of those who survived — and those who did not — the hurricane is more than a chapter in Florida history.
It is part of their family's history.
“There is a part of Florida whose history I think is important,” said Ned Hancock.
Hancock said the people who died and those who survived are part of the community's legacy.
“We need to remember that,” Hancock said. “We need to honor that.”
A century after the water rose over the embankment, the stories of Moore Haven's dead and survivors continue to be told.