Hurricane Party!

Hurricanes rarely hit Key West, and the island has been relatively lucky. Locals say that Hurricane Wilma on October 24, 2005, was the worst storm in memory. The entire island was told to evacuate. Business owners were forced to close their businesses. After the hurricane had passed, a storm surge sent eight feet of water inland, completely inundating a large portion of the lower Keys. Low-lying areas of Key West and the lower Keys, including major tourist destinations, were under as much as three feet of water. Sixty percent of the homes in Key West were flooded. The higher parts of Old Town, such as the Solares Hill and cemetery areas, did not flood, because of their higher elevations of 12 to 18 feet (5.5 m). The surge destroyed tens of thousands of cars throughout the lower Keys, and many houses were flooded with one to two feet of sea water. A local newspaper referred to Key West and the lower Keys as a “car graveyard.” The peak of the storm surge occurred when the eye of Wilma had already passed over the Naples area, and the sustained winds during the surge were less than 40 mph (64 km/h). The storm destroyed the piers at the clothing-optional Atlantic Shores Motel and breached the shark tank at the Key West Aquarium, freeing its sharks. Damage postponed the island’s famous Halloween Fantasy Fest until the following December. MTV’s The Real World: Key West was filming during the hurricane and deals with the storm.

In September 2005, NOAA opened its National Weather Service Forecast Office building on White Street. The building is designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane and its storm surge. Tours of the office are available, weather permitting, by appointment only.

The most intense previous hurricane was Hurricane Georges, a Category 2, in September 1998. The storm damaged many of the houseboats along Houseboat Row on South Roosevelt Boulevard near Cow Key channel on the east side of the island.