One of the strongest hurricanes to hit Florida came on Labor Day.

Hurricanes have a tragic history of interrupting Labor Day Weekend in Florida, including a 1935 storm that killed hundreds of World War I veterans who were working in the Florida Keys. It remains one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the United States in modern history.

That storm, a Category 5, had been expected to miss the Keys. But an unexpected change in its route left a group of more than 600 veterans working on a highway construction project exposed to its wrath. An 11-car train sent to attempt a rescue was swept off the tracks by a tidal wave.

“Negligence played no part in the failure to evacuate the 684 World War veterans from camps in the Florida Keys,” a New York Times article published days after the storm said, citing an official report to the president that attributed the losses to “an act of God.”

The 1935 storm, known simply as the Labor Day Hurricane, pushed up Florida’s west coast after battering the Keys, leading to high tides in St. Petersburg and Tampa and ripping roofs off buildings in Sarasota.

In all, 408 deaths were blamed on the Labor Day Hurricane, most of them in the Keys. A crowd of 20,000 mourners later gathered to pay their respects. The Times reported that the bodies of the veterans were burned at the scene “for the protection of those who survived.”

Three hurricane hunters took a flight into history.

Teams of researchers are routinely sent on flights into the centers of storms to gather crucial data. These so-called hurricane hunters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in Lakeland, Fla., and their partners went to get a snapshot of the storm’s insides.

On Thursday, the agency announced that it had completed a reconnaissance mission with its first all female three-pilot flight crew, featuring Capt. Kristie Twining, Cmdr. Rebecca Waddington and Lt. Lindsey Norman.