Mighty Storms of New England by Eric P. Fisher

Author:Eric P. Fisher [Fisher, Eric P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493043507
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2021-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938

“Our house—ours for 25 years—all our possessions, just gone. My God, it was something devastating and unreal, like the beginning of the world or the end of it.”

—KATHARINE HEPBURN

IMAGINE WAKING UP ON A PERFECT SUNNY AND 75°F SEPTEMBER DAY. You are whistling your way to work while enjoying the final warm moments of summer. Or you are a schoolchild gleefully skipping to class, still reveling in the start of a new year. Perhaps you are a fisherman setting a course toward the red sunrise, thinking about how successful the day’s catch may be. Then, within a few hours, the biggest weather calamity in over a century rips apart your world and sets a benchmark all other hurricanes will be measured against. No matter which of these characters you were, you had no idea such an event was possible when you first looked out the window. This was life on September 21, 1938.

If you are ranking all-time New England hurricanes, ’38 starts and ends the discussion. Second on the list is quite a ways down. Over the course of just five hours that day, forests were decimated. Storm surge inundated and annihilated coastal communities. Thousands of homes, cars, and boats were destroyed. Hundreds of lives were lost. No other storm has racked up a dizzying array of sobering statistics in such a short period of time.

In modern times, it goes beyond comprehension that such a monumental event could go relatively unnoticed until landfall. We would have chatter about favorable hurricane conditions weeks in advance. Up next, outlooks and National Hurricane Center cones showing the path ahead. Watches and warnings posted. Media coverage would start so early you might even be tired of hearing about the storm by the time it arrived. For those in 1938, there were no such luxuries. Satellite coverage, internet service, cable television, and smartphones would not be of any help. The only real notice given to New Englanders and Long Islanders on the morning of the storm were the brilliant sunrise as cirrus clouds fanned out ahead of the hurricane and the barometer ominously dropping like a rock.

The lack of technology and a path that avoided contact with land until the last minute made ’38 a difficult storm to track or warn. It was a classic Cape Verde hurricane, forming just off the coast of Africa on September 9 and taking a nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic. Since it was tough to observe storms, this meant it was up to ships at sea and outposts in the Caribbean Islands to relay what they were seeing and raise the alarm. There were a lot of blind spots and educated guessing was the only way to piece things together.

Even with this rudimentary warning system, information was flowing to the Weather Bureau Office in Jacksonville, Florida. On Sunday the 18th, a Brazilian merchant ship, the S.S. Alegrete, spotted the hurricane about three hundred miles north of Puerto Rico. It is believed peak intensity, likely Category 5 strength, was achieved around this time as it approached the Bahamas.

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