The hurricane with no name blew through New England on September 21st, 1938. The program concentrates mainly on Montauk Point, Long Island, New York, Napatree Point and Providence in Rhode Island, a few miles to the north.
The emphasis is on personal experiences at the time of this disaster. No one expected it and everyone was surprised. The New York Times forecast was for breezes and a chance of showers.
The individual stories are evocative and spooky. But I wish more attention had been paid to the reasons why the storm took the path it did. The Weather Bureau had been tracking it carefully but there was a general belief that hurricanes came ashore in the South -- from Florida to North Carolina. But had the technology and the data been available, it would have been clear to the meteorologists early on that the storm would not curve away and dissipate at sea. If I remember, it was blocked to the east by a high pressure area, and was influence from the west by an approaching low. The path between these two weather systems was virtually a paved expressway to the north, with direction signs pointing to Long Island and New England.
It zipped right up the coast. The day had dawned sunny but by two in the afternoon the clouds had gathered and were racing over the target. Barometers fell all along the coast and the winds had risen to 45 miles per hour. Still no hurricane warning. By late afternoon the winds were more than 100 miles per hour at Montauk. The storm hit the land with a shock that registered on seismographs in Alaska. Auxiliary buildings were swept away. The wealthy residents of Westhampton, Long Island, packed their family and guests into the car and drove off, leaving the help behind to face the wind and rising waters. "I'll never forget having to leave the servants," says one of them in her interview. By the way, one of the Montauk interviewees is a fisherman with an accent that's now dying out of eastern Long Island. It has its own name but resembles the "hoigh toiders" accent of Cape Hatteras.
In the end, the storm damaged New York City and Providence and demolished much of the coastline, killing more than 600 people and leaving 63,000 homeless, before fizzing out over Quebec. Downtown Providence was crowded with shops and stores. The wind rushing past the show windows lowered the air pressure to the extent that the windows popped out of their frames in one piece. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, there occurred what one social scientist has called "the convergence phenomenon." It means that looters showed up in droves. That's one of the reasons I love social scientists, being one myself. You get to make up great names for mundane things. This was 1938, mind you, and the Great Depression was a serious problem, and let us recall that Providence had few minorities at the time.
This was far from the worst hurricane in the United States and its damage was minimal to those that regularly take place in some other parts of the world, but it was relatively recent. There are survivors to be interviewed and newsreel footage to be shown. In its own right, it's a fascinating study of "denial." It's not going to happen here. We never have tornadoes because this was sacred Indian ground or there is a row of hills that protects us. The same reasoning could be applied to any contingency causes us discomfort. You know something? I'm never going to die because I'm already very old and I've never died in my life.
In the early 1900s, Galveston, Texas, was thoroughly demolished by an unexpected hurricane. The government responded by building a great cement sea wall to protect the city from the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a bare stretch of beach. In the last twenty years, the sea wall has been neglected, disregarded, and new condos and shops are being built on the Gulf side of the wall. I suppose, if you asked, the logic would run something like this: Yes, it did happen here. But that was a long time ago and we've gotten rid of our bad karma now.
The emphasis is on personal experiences at the time of this disaster. No one expected it and everyone was surprised. The New York Times forecast was for breezes and a chance of showers.
The individual stories are evocative and spooky. But I wish more attention had been paid to the reasons why the storm took the path it did. The Weather Bureau had been tracking it carefully but there was a general belief that hurricanes came ashore in the South -- from Florida to North Carolina. But had the technology and the data been available, it would have been clear to the meteorologists early on that the storm would not curve away and dissipate at sea. If I remember, it was blocked to the east by a high pressure area, and was influence from the west by an approaching low. The path between these two weather systems was virtually a paved expressway to the north, with direction signs pointing to Long Island and New England.
It zipped right up the coast. The day had dawned sunny but by two in the afternoon the clouds had gathered and were racing over the target. Barometers fell all along the coast and the winds had risen to 45 miles per hour. Still no hurricane warning. By late afternoon the winds were more than 100 miles per hour at Montauk. The storm hit the land with a shock that registered on seismographs in Alaska. Auxiliary buildings were swept away. The wealthy residents of Westhampton, Long Island, packed their family and guests into the car and drove off, leaving the help behind to face the wind and rising waters. "I'll never forget having to leave the servants," says one of them in her interview. By the way, one of the Montauk interviewees is a fisherman with an accent that's now dying out of eastern Long Island. It has its own name but resembles the "hoigh toiders" accent of Cape Hatteras.
In the end, the storm damaged New York City and Providence and demolished much of the coastline, killing more than 600 people and leaving 63,000 homeless, before fizzing out over Quebec. Downtown Providence was crowded with shops and stores. The wind rushing past the show windows lowered the air pressure to the extent that the windows popped out of their frames in one piece. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, there occurred what one social scientist has called "the convergence phenomenon." It means that looters showed up in droves. That's one of the reasons I love social scientists, being one myself. You get to make up great names for mundane things. This was 1938, mind you, and the Great Depression was a serious problem, and let us recall that Providence had few minorities at the time.
This was far from the worst hurricane in the United States and its damage was minimal to those that regularly take place in some other parts of the world, but it was relatively recent. There are survivors to be interviewed and newsreel footage to be shown. In its own right, it's a fascinating study of "denial." It's not going to happen here. We never have tornadoes because this was sacred Indian ground or there is a row of hills that protects us. The same reasoning could be applied to any contingency causes us discomfort. You know something? I'm never going to die because I'm already very old and I've never died in my life.
In the early 1900s, Galveston, Texas, was thoroughly demolished by an unexpected hurricane. The government responded by building a great cement sea wall to protect the city from the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a bare stretch of beach. In the last twenty years, the sea wall has been neglected, disregarded, and new condos and shops are being built on the Gulf side of the wall. I suppose, if you asked, the logic would run something like this: Yes, it did happen here. But that was a long time ago and we've gotten rid of our bad karma now.
