The Great Hurricane: 1938

Natural History, Oct, 2005 by Laurence A. Marschall

The Great Hurricane: 1938 by Cherie Burns Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005; $24.00

The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina still feels like a punch in the belly of the Southeast, but surely, at least, the warning and evacuation saved many lives. Not so with the great storm that hit the Northeast on September 20-21, 1938. Hurricanes hardly happen there anyway, but with no timely warning, the storm caught everyone by surprise.

Spawned in the eastern Atlantic and reported by a few passing vessels as it headed northeast after skirting the Bahamas, the great storm disappeared from weather stations when it missed northern Florida and headed out to sea. There were few ships along its path, and in an age when radar, satellite photos, and oceanographic buoys did not exist, there was no way to know that it was intensifying to what we would now call a category-four hurricane and heading straight for the eastern coast of Long Island with the speed of a bullet train. By the time barometers began to drop precipitously in the Northeast, it was too late. There was no Weather Channel, no Internet, no stand-ups by wind-whipped, rain-soaked TV reporters, and, of course, no evacuation plan.

"Rain, heavy at times" was the official prediction for the Northeast coast when the hurricane slammed into the Hamptons, rolled over Long Island Sound, and pummeled eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island. It was, by then, gargantuan in size and unprecedented in strength: 500 miles across and pushing a storm surge big enough to look like a tsunami. To make matters worse, a high-pressure system moving down from the north collided with the hurricane just as it reached inhabited territory. The storm stalled, dropping between ten and seventeen inches of rain on eastern Long Island, coastal Connecticut, and Rhode Island in a matter of hours, and keeping the floodwaters high for far longer than usual.

Writer Cherie Burns, who has seen her share of wind and weather from her home on Nantucket, has dug up old newspaper accounts and local histories to reconstruct the terror and destruction that accompanied the 1938 hurricane. Those who suffered the most, of course, did not survive to tell their tales. Nearly 700 people died, and about 63,000 were left homeless. Among the coastal enclaves of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, as many as 9,000 homes were totally destroyed. Some communities, such as the cottage colony at Napatree Point, Rhode Island, were so completely obliterated that pictures taken the morning after show nothing but a long stretch of barren sand. At the height of the storm, corpses floated up the city streets of downtown Providence.

Survivor's stories, however, give ample feeling for the power of the rain, tide, and wind. Katharine Hepburn, who wrote about the hurricane in her memoirs, evacuated her home in Fenwick, Connecticut, when the chimneys blew down and a wing of the house collapsed in the wind. The next morning, she found what remained of the blown-off wing, wrapped around a stone bridge a third of a mile away.

With power and telephone lines down, roads washed out, and bridges gone, it was as if the most populous part of the nation had been leveled by an invading army. In fact, had Hitler's armies not overrun Czechoslovakia a few days later, the great storm might still be remembered as a defining moment in history. Burns's narrative makes one appreciate anew the strengths of modern communications and emergency planning, as well as their ultimate powerlessness against the forces of nature.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy. He is the 2005 winner of the Education prize of the American Astronomical Society.