Hurricane Dora

50 Years Ago: Hurricane Dora Remembered

by Alec Newell



10th Street and Oceanfront Atlantic Beach, in the wake of Hurricane Dora

In September of 1964, I was 15 years old.  My family lived on 12th Street in Atlantic Beach.  We had experienced hurricanes before, but Dora would leave us with our most memorable impressions.  During a lull in that storm our whole family decided to walk down to the beach to see for ourselves what was happening.  There was an eight foot high curved seawall along the beach that had been designed to redirect the force of a storm surge back onto itself, but it had not been designed to withstand the kind of pounding we witnessed that day.  Waves were surging over the seawall and the force of the current was washing away the sand behind it.   As the erosion accelerated, it exposed the heavy metal cables that anchored the seawall back to the ocean front yards it was supposed to be protecting.

The Bull House



At the foot of 11th Street, between the Old Bull House and the house just south of it, there was a 20 ft. high palm tree growing above the level of the seawall.  Several waves surged over that tree forcing the palm fronds at the top of that tree back down over its trunk.  The waves were a heavy dark grey that matched the color of the sky and there was a strong current moving debris in the surf north with a force I'd never seen before.  I remember seeing another full grown palm tree with bright green fronds float by us at an amazing clip indicating an even more serious erosion problem somewhere to the south of us.

 

Atlantic Beach Hotel pool with covered promenade, before Dora

We walked south another block to the foot of 10th Street to get a better look at the Atlantic Beach Hotel and its pier which were also taking a beating.  The hotel had a giant swimming pool that was flanked by a two story frame building  and a stucco masonry bathhouse, just south of where we were standing.  In front of the swimming pool there was a wide veranda with a planked promenade and a row of heavy Adirondack beach chairs that faced the ocean.

 

Atlantic Beach Hotel from the air, after Dora 1964

As waves crashed over the seawall, we watched the roof of the veranda collapse. Surging waves pushed floating debris from the veranda and some of the Adirondack chairs back into the swimming pool.  What didn't settle in the pool was dragged back over the seawall and washed out to sea when the waves retreated.  The pilings under the pier began to wobble, lean, then fail, taking whole sections of lumber into the heavy surf.  Just weeks before, some of the boys who regularly surfed the Atlantic Beach Pier had been out testing their mettle in the giant waves that had accompanied Hurricane Cleo earlier that season, but no one went out during Dora.

Atlantic Beach Hotel from the beach 1964

Being a teenager and not a property owner, I remember being mostly exhilarated by the event.  My mother had filled white plastic bleach bottles with drinking water; the bathtub had been filled with water for washing dishes and flushing toilets.  We had a battery operated transistor radio and flashlights. Our concrete block house felt secure against the wind and rain, and we played cards or board games at night by the light of a Coleman lantern that was normally used for night fishing in better weather.  The whole experience was like being on an extended time-out from school and the real world.

The damage to our house was minimal.  We lost a few roofing shingles, and there were downed palm fronds and tree limbs all over our yard, but we had experienced no real flooding.  Standing water covered most of the yard and all of 12th Street, giving the visual impression that our house sat on a small island surrounded by a vast moat with palm trees growing out of it.  We had been lucky.

Damage along Old A-1-A in South Ponte Vedra Beach



It wasn't until days later, riding around in a car, that we began to appreciate how much real damage the hurricane had inflicted on other parts of the Beach.  Trees and power lines were down everywhere, sea walls had been breached and homes and businesses were severely damaged or gone.  Some ocean front home owners had had junked cars towed to their homes and rolled into the trenches behind their seawalls in an effort to slow the erosion which was undermining their house foundations.  It was days before the storm water began to  recede, weeks before the mountains of yard trash could be removed, months  to repair, and years to replace some of the damaged buildings.  President Lyndon B. Johnson and his entourage personally toured the Jacksonville Beaches and declared Northeast Florida a national disaster area.  The property damage left in the wake of Hurricane Dora was estimated to be 280 million dollars in 1964, or the equivalent of 2.07 billion dollars in today's money.