page_title: 1947 Fort Lauderdale hurricane
section_title: Gulf Coast of the United States
hierarchical_section_title: 1947 Fort Lauderdale hurricane / Impact / Gulf Coast of the United States
caption_attribution_description: Jefferson Parish, Louisiana: Moissant Airport flooded after the 19 September 1947 Hurricane.
context_page_description: The 1947 Fort Lauderdale hurricane was a long-lived and an intense tropical cyclone that affected the Bahamas, southernmost Florida, and the Gulf Coast of the United States in September 1947. The fourth Atlantic tropical cyclone of the year, it formed in the eastern Atlantic Ocean on September 4, becoming a hurricane, the third of the 1947 Atlantic hurricane season, less than a day later. After moving south by west for the next four days, it turned to the northwest and rapidly attained strength beginning on September 9. It reached a peak intensity of 145 mph on September 15 while approaching the Bahamas. In spite of contemporaneous forecasts that predicted a strike farther north, the storm then turned to the west and poised to strike South Florida, crossing first the northern Bahamas at peak intensity. In the Bahamas, the storm produced a large storm surge and heavy damage, but with no reported fatalities.
  A day later, the storm struck South Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, its eye becoming the first and only of a major hurricane to strike Fort Lauderdale.
context_section_description: The center of the storm, estimated at the time to have been 25 mi (40 km) wide, passed directly over the business district of New Orleans between 1530 and 1700 UTC, making the storm the first major hurricane to pass over the city since 1915; no other storm would pass so close to downtown New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Before the eye arrived, wind instruments at Moisant Airport were disabled after just having registered sustained winds of 90 mph (140 km/h). Due to the increasing northerly winds, water overtopped sections of the levees on Lake Pontchartrain, leaving some lakefront streets submerged "waist deep," above the 3-ft (0.92-m) delimiter. As communications failed during the calm eye, the Weather Bureau office in Fort Worth, Texas, assumed the duties of the New Orleans office by broadcasting advisories to the public. During the eye, atmospheric pressure in New Orleans dropped as low as 968.9 mb (28.61 inHg) by 1649 UTC.
  A large part of Greater New Orleans was flooded, with 2 ft (0.61 m) of water shutting down Moisant Field and 6 ft (1.8 m) of water in parts of Jefferson Parish. The storm surge in Louisiana peaked at 9.8–11.2 ft (3.0–3.4 m) at Shell Beach on Lake Borgne—today submerged due to erosion from the construction in 1968 of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet—and at 11.5 ft (3.5 m) in Ostrica. The surge overtopped the 9-ft-tall (2.7-m) Orleans Parish seawall, built by the Orleans Levee Board in the 1920s to prevent a repeat of the 1915 hurricane there, and spread water over 9 sq mi (23 km²) of the parish, as far from Lake Pontchartrain as Gentilly Ridge. Large portions of Jefferson Parish remained flooded for as long as two weeks. Subsidence settled behind the levees, leaving "topographic bowls" containing up to 6 ft (1.8 m) of water, to be excavated by dredging and pumping the water back into Lake Pontchartrain. Saint Bernard and Plaquemines parishes were also inundated by an 11-ft (3.4-m) storm surge, though mainly sparsely populated areas were affected.
  A storm tide of up to 15.2 ft (4.6 m) was reported along the western half of the Mississippi coastline, causing heavy damage in Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, and Biloxi. The recorded tides in these communities were the highest ever recorded until Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 hurricane in 1969 and one of the strongest hurricanes to strike the United States with sustained winds of 175 mph (282 km/h), produced tides of up to 21.7 ft (6.6 m). Although the storm had weakened by its second landfall, the hydrology of the region makes it particularly vulnerable to hurricanes. 12 people were killed in Louisiana and 22 in Mississippi. In both states combined, the Red Cross reported that the storm destroyed 1,647 homes and damaged 25,000 others, with the majority, up to 90%, of the destroyed having been due to water. In New Orleans, the storm produced an estimated 1947 USD$100,000,000 worth of damage to the city. Barometric pressures as low as 971.6 mb (28.69 inHg) and sustained winds as high as 96 mph (154 km/h), equivalent to Category 2 intensity, were reported as far inland as Baton Rouge.
caption: Moisant Airport flooded
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