Hurricane Dora (1964) in Jacksonville

Hurricane Dora came ashore just north of St. Augustine shortly after midnight on September 10, 1964, putting Jacksonville and the Duval County coast on the storm's north side.

The National Weather Service places the landfall, based on radar, at 12:20 a.m. on September 10, 6 miles north of St. Augustine, and calls Dora the first hurricane to make landfall over northeast Florida in the 20th century. NOAA's U.S. Coast Pilot for the Jacksonville area describes Dora as one of the worst storms to affect the area and says it made landfall north of St. Augustine in the early morning hours of September 10, 1964. The U.S. Geological Survey wrote in its 1976 report on flood-prone areas of Jacksonville that the major flood of record in Duval County occurred in 1964, when Hurricane Dora crossed the area.

Official accounts differ on how strong Dora was at the coast. NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory gives landfall winds estimated around 115 mph, while the National Weather Service flood summary estimates peak winds in St. Augustine at 125 mph. Both figures are reported here as each agency states them. For Jacksonville the measured numbers matter more: the Coast Pilot records the first sustained hurricane wind speeds in the 80-year period of record for the Weather Bureau Air Station at Jacksonville.

Dora was a Cape Verde hurricane that turned west toward Jacksonville and northeast Florida instead of curving out to sea, then slowed and looped offshore before landfall.

According to AOML, Dora formed near the Cape Verde islands west of Africa in late August, became a tropical storm on September 1 and reached peak sustained winds of 130 mph. A mid-latitude trough that forecasters expected to carry it out to sea missed it, and Dora took a more westerly course aimed at northeast Florida and the Jacksonville coast. On September 9 the hurricane slowed and began several loops while the Weather Bureau radar in Daytona Beach tracked it. AOML lists Dora as the second in a quartet of 1964 Florida hurricanes, after Cleo and before Hilda and Isbell.

The NOAA Weather Prediction Center calls Dora the first hurricane to impact northeast Florida in at least 79 years and notes that its slow approach to the north Florida coast gave a populace not used to hurricane evacuation the time to leave. The National Weather Service says the storm was briefly a Category 4 with 130 mph winds about 300 miles south of Bermuda before it turned west, and that it weakened slightly as it approached the northeast Florida coast on the evening of September 9. After landfall Dora pushed west across north Florida, then made a near 180 degree turn on September 11 and headed east-northeast across southern Georgia on the 12th and 13th, which kept rain falling over north Florida, including the Jacksonville area, for days.

Mayport measured 65 knots with gusts to 80 knots, and the Jacksonville airport recorded 71-knot sustained winds, according to NOAA's Coast Pilot.

The Coast Pilot adds that unusually high tides were produced by onshore winds that exceeded 50 knots for some 12 hours. That long fetch of onshore wind, more than any single gust, is what drove the water at the Jacksonville Beaches and up the St. Johns River. The National Weather Service makes the same point for the whole northeast coast: because the hurricane approached at a perpendicular angle with strong, long-duration onshore winds, tides ran 5 to 8 feet or more above normal.

Dora's surge on the St. Johns River in downtown Jacksonville stood as the record, at 4.1 feet, until Hurricane Irma in 2017, the National Weather Service reports.

The NWS office in Tallahassee wrote after Irma that the St. Johns River in downtown Jacksonville saw 5.57 feet of storm surge flooding, exceeding the all-time record of 4.1 feet set in 1964 by Hurricane Dora. The NOAA river gauge for the St. Johns River at Jacksonville, which measures height above mean higher high water, ranks the September 9, 1964 crest at 3.49 feet, third among its historic crests, behind an estimated 6.00 feet in 1846 and 4.41 feet during Irma. The two numbers measure different things, surge above the normal tide and stage above the high-tide datum, so they are reported side by side rather than reconciled.

Source: NOAA National Water Prediction Service, gauge SJLF1. The gauge lists major flooding at 3.00 feet above MHHW.

The Coast Pilot explains why the river side and the ocean side behaved differently: storm surge heights are greatest along the beaches and the entrance jetties at Mayport and then decrease rapidly up the St. Johns River. The USGS used the 1964 flood as Duval County's flood of record when it mapped the 100-year flood across the consolidated city of Jacksonville, noting that floods there come from rainfall combined with storm-driven tides.

Dora's slow track west of Jacksonville spread more than 10 inches of rain over an estimated 10,000 square miles of north Florida.

The National Weather Service reports that the heaviest rain fell across Lafayette and Suwannee counties on September 12, with a storm total of 23.73 inches at Mayo and 18.62 inches in the heavily flooded town of Live Oak. Dora produced the flood of record on the Santa Fe River at Fort White and was the flood of record for the St. Marys River basin north of Jacksonville until Tropical Storm Debby eclipsed it in 2012. The Weather Prediction Center rainfall analysis, built from National Climatic Data Center data, shows the same maximum at Mayo and notes that the heaviest rain fell on September 11 and 12 as the storm doubled back east.

Along the coast, the NWS records tides estimated at 12 feet across Anastasia Island off St. Augustine, numerous coastal roads damaged or destroyed, and over 40 homes lost along the northeast Florida coast, the coast that includes the Duval County beaches. The NWS estimates total storm damage in Florida at $200 to $230 million in 1964 dollars. Over Dora's whole life, AOML counts 5 deaths and US$250 million in damage, a wider measure than the Florida total.

A federal disaster was declared for Florida on September 10, 1964, the day Dora reached Jacksonville, and the name Dora was retired after the season.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster record DR-176-FL lists Florida Hurricane Dora, the storm that brought Duval County its flood of record, with an incident period of September 10, 1964 and a declaration date of September 10, 1964. The National Hurricane Center lists Dora among the three Atlantic names retired in 1964, with Cleo and Hilda, two of the other storms in that year's Florida quartet.

Dora remains the reference storm for Jacksonville's tropical risk. The Coast Pilot counts 69 tropical cyclones that have come within 50 miles of Jacksonville since 1842, 21 of them since 1950, and warns that the Captain of the Port Jacksonville zone should not be considered a safe hurricane haven. It also notes that an October 1944 hurricane combined with an offshore nor'easter to push tides to 12.3 feet above mean sea level at Jacksonville Beach, more than the 5 to 7 feet Dora produced, so Dora does not hold the Beaches tide record.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the NWS Florida flood history and its Tallahassee Irma summary, the AOML and Weather Prediction Center Dora pages, the Jacksonville chapter of the Coast Pilot, NOAA's St. Johns River gauge, the USGS flood report, FEMA's DR-176 record and the Hurricane Center's retired-name list.