Hurricane Dora really took Jacksonville by storm
The worst and most active month for Atlantic hurricanes is September, with the peak occurring around Sept. 10 – and that was indeed the case in 1964 and again in 2017.
At approximately 12:20 a.m. on Sept. 10, 1964, Hurricane Dora made landfall in Jacksonville with a 50-mile-wide eyewall and a recorded 125 miles per hour wind gusts. Fifty-three years and one day later, Jacksonville experienced Hurricane Irma’s weaker fury of 87 mph wind gusts.
Water inundates first floor of Jacksonville Utilities building on Pearl Street.
How else do those two weather events compare?
While Hurricane Dora hit Duval County just after midnight on Sept. 10, Irma waited until the early morning hour of 6:57 a.m. on Sept. 11 to say “hello” from 100 miles west of Jacksonville. Dora was a Category 2 with less than six inches of rain; although Irma lost her mojo and ebbed from a Cat 1 to tropical storm status, she still dumped more than 11 inches of rain on the greater Jacksonville area. In 1964’s weather event, the St. Johns River crested at 4.12 feet; in 2017, the river rose to 5.57 feet before reaching its zenith, according to the Climate Center at Florida State University.
Young boy holds up a fish in his backyard, while JEA linemen work on power interruptions after Hurricane Dora
Young boys pluck fish from the parking lot at Purcell’s at the Roosevelt Mall.
Dora destroyed 95% of the distribution system, leaving most residents without power for six days in 1964; in 2017 JEA restored power to 87% of its affected customers within four days. Riverside and San Marco were some of the worst neighborhoods to be affected by Irma, while the Ortega/Venetia area of Yacht Club Road and Pirates Cove was the hardest hit in 1964 and still took a hard punch from Irma 53 years later.
The cost of damage done by Dora was calculated to be $200 million in 1964 (comparable to $2.23 billion in 2017 dollars), while Irma’s invoice in 2017 was $144 million, according to FEMA reports a month afterward.
Hurricane Irma in 2017 wasn’t the first time St. Vincent’s Hospital in Riverside saw the St. Johns River on its doorstep
A lone vehicle heads toward Jacksonville as most of its residents flee in the other direction.
A flooded municipal parking lot.
Contributed by
The Jacksonville History Center