Hurricane Dora Hit St. Augustine With 110 MPH Winds in 1964: Northeast Florida's Benchmark Storm

Jacksonville, Fla. - Hurricane Dora came ashore about 6 miles north of St. Augustine at 12:20 a.m. on Sept. 10, 1964, according to the National Weather Service. It was the first hurricane to make landfall in Northeast Florida in the 20th century.

NOAA's official hurricane database puts Dora's sustained winds at about 110 mph at landfall, a strong Category 2. The Weather Service estimates peak winds in St. Augustine reached 125 mph. Tides ran 5 to 8 feet or more above normal along the coast, and about 12 feet across Anastasia Island.

Dora by the numbers

From the coast of Africa to St. Augustine

Dora started as a tropical depression near the Cape Verde Islands on Aug. 28, 1964, NOAA's records show. It became a tropical storm Aug. 31 and a hurricane Sept. 2.

The storm peaked on Sept. 6, more than 500 miles north of Puerto Rico, at 130 mph with a central pressure of 942 millibars. It then turned west toward Florida and weakened slightly, but it stayed a hurricane all the way to the coast.

Dora slowed as it neared North Florida, the Weather Prediction Center says. That gave people time to evacuate, though few residents had any experience with hurricane evacuations. NOAA calls Dora the first hurricane to hit Northeast Florida in at least 79 years.

The storm's path after landfall

Times are converted from the six-hour positions in NOAA's HURDAT2 database. The landfall time comes from Weather Service radar.

Damage on the coast

The Weather Service says many coastal roads were damaged or destroyed, and more than 40 homes along the coast were lost. Its count runs from 40 to 43, depending on the report.

Because Dora slowed as it reached the coast, high tides and pounding surf hit the beaches for hours.

Rain and river flooding inland

Dora's rain did as much damage inland as its winds did on the coast. More than 10 inches of rain fell over about 10,000 square miles, the Weather Service says.

The heaviest rain fell Sept. 11 and 12, the Weather Prediction Center says, as the slow-moving storm turned and doubled back east.

The rain caused the flood of record on the Santa Fe River at Fort White. It also set the record for the St. Marys River basin, which held until Tropical Storm Debby in 2012. The Weather Service reports one drowning, in Live Oak.

The Beatles played anyway

The Beatles' concert at the Gator Bowl went ahead on Sept. 11, 1964, the day after landfall. Action News Jax reports the band insisted on playing to an integrated audience at the then-segregated stadium.

Why Dora still matters

More than 60 years later, Dora is still the benchmark storm for Jacksonville and St. Augustine. Its damage had several causes: storm surge on the beaches, a slow-moving center and days of inland flooding. Those are the same hazards forecasters warn about today.

Know your evacuation zone and check the Jax Times hurricane center when a storm is coming.

How we did this

Jax Times rebuilt this story on Oct. 24, 2026, from three federal sources:

• Track and intensity: NOAA's HURDAT2 Atlantic hurricane database, the official record of every storm's six-hour position, winds and pressure.
• Landfall, winds, tides, damage and river flooding: the National Weather Service's account of Hurricane Dora in its Florida flood history.
• Rainfall: the NOAA Weather Prediction Center's Dora rainfall summary.

Knots are converted to mph and rounded. Times are converted from UTC to Eastern.

Earlier versions of this story relied on Wikipedia. We removed figures we couldn't confirm in these records, including power-outage counts, county-by-county home damage and national death tolls.