Florida History - Natural Disaster
In August 2005, one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the history of America hit Florida. It was Hurricane Katrina that killed no less than 1,836 people and caused floods that produced $81.2 billion dollars in damage across Cuba, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and other southeastern and northeastern states, ending in Quebec, Canada.
However, before Katrina, Florida knew the fury of another deadliest hurricane in September 1928, when the Okeechobee Hurricane, also known as Hurricane San Felipe Segundo, struck the peninsula coasts after hitting Puerto Rico, Bahamas, and other Caribbean Islands.
Hurricanes are natural disasters that have been repeated throughout Florida's history, along with tornadoes, thunderstorms, severe hailstorms, extreme cold, or extreme heat.
Even though, natural disasters in Florida have occurred as earlier as thousand years where this land was three times its actual size while it was inhabited by glyptodonts (giant armadillos) and other ancient mammals prior to the Ice Age
The Florida plateau, where the actual peninsula lies, was formed nearly 530 million years ago, initially made of marine sedimentation; it was the natural disasters produced by volcanic activity that began to shape the actual land.
Originally, the plateau was a part of Pangaea, a super continent in which Florida occupied the center of it with North America, South America, and Africa surrounding the eventual peninsula.
Tectonic movements caused new natural disasters that divided Pangaea up in different irregular continents, including Laurasia, the actual North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, and Gondwana, comprising South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica.
Over a million years, the movement of tectonic plateaus kept playing an important role in the earth's geology, until the Sea level came into play changing the ecology and topography of Florida about two million years ago during the Ice Age.
By the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, Florida was a much larger peninsula, but extremely drier, inhabited by mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, and giant armadillo that eventually would disappear as new natural disasters occurred during the Pleistocene when climatic changes occurred.
The actual Florida's Everglades is one of the areas created by those climatic disasters that occurred about 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. Such changes also changed the sea level again along with the soils of the region.
Florida's topography is today the result of sediments that were either created or deposited when a natural disaster increased or decreased the sea level, at the time that natural sea currents eroded the coastline throughout a thousand years.
Once the peninsula began to take its actual shape, the limestone bedrock and the sea waves continued causing small terrain disasters that derived into vertical shafts, sinkholes, springs, caves, disappearing streams, and even complex underground drainage systems.
In modern times, some of the natural disasters that have hit Florida include Hurricane Wilma (2005), Miami Tornado (1997), Great Storm (1975), Kissimmee Tornado Outbreak (1998), Bugaboo Scrub Wildfire (2007), Storm of the Century (1993), Great Appalachian Storm of November (1950), Gulf of Mexico earthquake (2006), and the frontal wave Nor'easter in 1994 that also stroke Florida ten years before.