Previous, related Dalton column: The Great New England Hurricane

August 28, 2008 04:45 am

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On Wednesday, Sept. 21, 1938. Andover and New England took a beating from an immense and vicious hurricane. It was called the "Great New England Hurricane," "The Hurricane of '38," and "The Long Island Express." In an earlier column I did for the Townsman, I wrote about Hurricane Carol, which caused serious destruction in 1954. Those who remember both hurricanes in Andover say that the '38 storm was more frightening and damaging.

The Hurricane of '38 and Carol had a similarity, besides the high winds and rains: the eyes of both storms passed to our west leaving Andover on the dangerous eastern semicircle of the storms. All storms in the Northern Hemisphere have a counter-clockwise rotation, meaning that hurricanes to our west have their wind speed increased by their forward motion. The hurricane of '38 had a freakish forward speed of 50 to 70 miles per hour, a speed never equaled before or after, which added to its already devastating winds. Although Carol had been powerful, it was small in diameter and had a narrow destruction path. The Great Hurricane was a giant in comparison to most hurricanes. As Hurricane Carol approached there was adequate notice for anyone caring to heed it. Its forward speed was in the normal range of storms, 10 to 20 miles per hour, and it was carefully tracked by experts. Boston television weatherman Don Kent, who became the national model for aspiring television weathermen and women, became a star because of his coverage of Carol. He tracked the storm, and gave articulate warnings. Folks in Andover had ample opportunity to get home and prepare. The Great Hurricane of '38 came with no warning to the public.

In her book, "Sudden Sea, The Great Hurricane of 1938" (Little, Brown, 2003) author R.A. Scotti states that the storm was the worst natural disaster in United States history up to its time. She argues that "... although other disasters had claimed more lives, when all factors are taken together - the number of lives lost; the number of states, families, and industries affected; the breadth of the storm; the physical and social changes to the area; and the dollar cost - as of 1938, no natural disaster had been as terrible as this hurricane." Whether she is correct or not, the storm is among the worst natural disasters in North America, greater even than the San Francisco earthquake and fire. The Hurricane of '38 killed over 690 people, and seriously injured almost 1,800. Five-thousand homes were destroyed, 15,000 seriously damaged; 20,000 power poles fell, and 2,600 cars were ruined. In today's money, the storm caused damage estimated at between 5 and 20 billion dollars. Entire communities in southern Rhode Island and Connecticut were washed away forever, and the shoreline of Rhode Island was permanently changed. If a similar hurricane hit the area today, the damages would be multiples of those numbers.

It is commonly believed that the storm couldn't be predicted. Not true. The storm was monitored by meteorologists based on reports from official weather stations and ships at sea. It had been on a course to hit Florida. It didn't, and like many hurricanes turned north. Then, it was predicted to give Cape Hatteras a blow before sliding northeast causing possible gale winds to Long Island and Cape Cod before expiring over the North Atlantic. This is a usual path for hurricanes that come up the East Coast. The cause of this usual path is the "Bermuda High," that sits over Bermuda during the hurricane season. This high pushes hurricanes into a slot near the southeastern coast of the US and then allows them to slide north of the high pressure and move away from the coast. Although hurricanes are particularly capricious in southern latitudes, they are more predictable as they rotate around the Bermuda High. So, what went meteorologically wrong in 1938? The Bermuda high moved north of its usual position forcing the hurricane to continue north instead of northeast, and the barometric pressures over New England were low because of an inland rain that had soaked the region. It was one of the wettest summers on record. The atmospheric pressures on September 21, 1938 invited, perhaps forced, the Great Hurricane to wreck New England. In fact, everything worked in favor of destruction; it was the time of the autumnal equinox with it's higher than normal high tides. Worse, the hurricanes landfall would occur just prior to high tide, and the wet summer meant that the ground and rivers already were filled with water.

One junior forecaster in the meteorology center in Washington predicted the storm would hit New England. He was ignored by his boss. At least one ship south of New England had reported the storm; the experts, including that boss, ignored the report. Besides, for reasons not fully understood, the forward motion of the storm reached historical proportions, fooling the experts as to where the storm was; they had lost the storm. And, the last great hurricane in New England had been in 1815, so why would an expert be so brave as to predict that this '38 hurricane would be unlike the hundreds of hurricanes that had scooted to New England's east?

It was partly cloudy and breezy on Long Island that Wednesday morning, a rather pleasant day compared to what had been before. Because of the hurricane's speed, Long island's weather went from fair to heinous within 150 minutes. Fifty people died over the sparsely east end of the island. The eye of the storm passed there about 3:00 PM, and headed up the Connecticut River Valley. The dangerous eastern semicircle hit Rhode Island just prior to high tide, killing at least 433 people, including many children coming home from school. A school bus was overturned by the wind and most of the trapped victims drowned. In the town of Westerly, Rhode Island, 100 people died. The 17 foot storm surge occurred so quickly that people went from being entertained by the beauty of the surf to having their houses washed away within minutes, perhaps seconds. Observers reported seeing a tidal wave so big they thought it was a fog bank, and it instantly destroyed hundreds of beach homes. Some stretches of beach were so swept clean of dwellings that there was no evidence of them the next day. The impact of the wave was so huge that it registered on seismographs over 3000 miles away. The ocean's surge funneled up the Narragansett Bay and into Providence, hitting at rush hour. In minutes, the downtown was buried in over 13 feet of water, higher than the flood caused by the Great Hurricane of 1815. Several people trapped in their cars drowned. Dozens of pedestrians were tossed along flooded streets as people in buildings above them watched with disbelieving horror. The looting that followed the flood was so bad that police ignored it. In New London, Connecticut, the storm caused a fire that burned much of the business district. As the storm passed through Connecticut, 97 people were killed. Along the south coast beaches of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, most houses were closed for the summer or else the death toll would have been in the thousands.

The hurricane was 500 miles wide. The devastation and destruction stretched from the Berkshires to the coast and the storm moved so fast that it's winds barely dissipated until it had gone far into New Hampshire, Vermont, and then Quebec. When it went by the Blue Hills Observatory in Milton Massachusetts, the gusts blew as high as 183 mph with sustained winds over 120 mph. Winds were so strong that people caught outside had their clothing ripped from their bodies. In Gloucester, observers reported waves as high as 50 feet. Eighty-eight people were killed in Massachusetts.

Andover had no fatalities or reports of serious injury, but it lost hundreds of trees, and power was gone for days and in some areas more than a week. Men working with handsaws took several days to clear trees to make roads passable. Many of the trees lost were stately old maples and elms. Town officials quickly allocated $25,000 for "rehabilitation" ( over 330,000 dollars in today's money). The wind blew the roof off the Tyer Rubber building scattering bricks and girders onto Lewis Street, according to "Andover, A Century of Change" (Eleanor Motley Richardson, published for the Andover Historical Society by the Andover Townsman, 1995). There are a number of pictures in "Andover, What It Was, What It Is" (published by the Andover Townsman, 1946), with these words, "And the wind blew - about 4:00 in the afternoon of what had started out as a nice quiet September day, the fire department was called because some wires had fallen near Shawsheen road - then Hell broke loose, and in one awesome night hundreds of trees went down with little regard to where they fell - and once again the quiet little Shawsheen went off on a mighty rampage. This was the hurricane of 1938." The pictures show a horse-drawn milk wagon in flooded Shawsheen, trees on housing structures, and the collapse of part of the large retaining wall, between the Punchard House and Main Street (across the street from where Friendly's was later built).

As the hurricane moved north it killed 13 people in New Hampshire and seven in Vermont. It caused a calamitous fire in Peterborough, New Hampshire, damaged the Cog Railway on Mount Washington, damaged buildings in Maine and destroyed fruit orchards on both sides of the Canadian border. In all, 275 million trees were destroyed in New England, including one-third of Vermont's sugar maples. Tens of thousand livestock were killed. The Associate Press reported the next day, "The greens and commons of New England will never be the same. Picture postcard mementos of the oldest part of the United States are gone with the wind and flood. The day of the 'biggest wind' has just passed and a great part of the most picturesque America, as old as the Pilgrims, has gone beyond recall or replacement...."