South Florida "Tsunami" in 1962

So I found this in the February 20th edition of the Miami Herald.. great section with big two page spread on tsunami and natural disasters and such..and that cute George Pararas-Carayannis marine scientist is mentioned. Merzer does great old Miami and trivia on history/weather stories... earth sciences..etc.

personally today I'd rather be at the Deli Restaurant in Key West... favorite breakfast spot.. tucked away a bit inland and probably wouldn't get wet from any big waves on South Beach/Key West's South Beach.

*****

See why Miamian's watch the waves and the weather...

Some Can Remember When The Ocean Gave South Florida a Taste of Its Might
by Martin Merzer

Old-timers remember it well, and some remember it as a South Florida tsunami.

Mountainous waves that seemed to come out of nowhere flooded oceanfront hotels in Miami Beach, Hallandale and Hollywood, killed at least one person, injured at least nine others, bulldozed 50 feet from local beaches and caused a lot of other trouble.

The three-day event began on March 7, 1962.

''One morning about 8 a.m., the pool and cabana manager and his crew were setting up the lounge chairs when he looked out into the ocean and saw a tremendous wave headed right for the hotel,'' Arnold Seamon of Weston wrote in an e-mail. Back then, he was working at the Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach.

``He immediately ran into the coffee shop and had the 400 breakfast guests and employees evacuated to the main floor of the hotel just before the wave came over the seawall. The water rose to a height of 3 ½ feet inside and did considerable damage to all of the kitchen and bakeshop equipment, laundry machines, elevator machinery, etc. . . . It took almost a week to pump out all the water.''

It was much the same up the East Coast and in the Bahamas.

It sounds like a tsunami -- but it was not.

The source, experts said, was a freak offshore storm more than 1,000 miles away. In fact, the weather was otherwise so nice in South Florida that many people called the experience the ``fair weather storm.''