Sudden Sea (13 page)
Like so many others, the Schmid sisters thought the gusty Wednesday weather was normal. “Every September there was a three-day wind when the breakers would be spectacular,” Mona remembered. “Friends called to ask if we’d like to go to the ocean to watch, but we refused because we had to visit Peggy.” Peggy was Peggy Connolly Brown, the wife of a young attorney. The Browns lived in an oceanfront cottage about half a mile down Dune Road with their seven-month-old daughter, Judith. In the morning, Mona and Joan did some errands with Annie Seeley, their maid. Annie had worked for the Schmids for seventeen years. The sisters couldn’t remember life without her. They arrived at Peggy’s house about three o’clock. It was already very windy, and in a matter of minutes, a frantic call came from Annie. She was on the third floor. The ocean was on the second. While Joan was trying to reassure her, the phone died. Her call must have been one of the last to get through.
Afraid for Annie’s safety, Mona and Joan started home. They were driving their mother’s car, a gray and red Cadillac La Salle with her monogram on the side. Dune Road was flooded. As they crept through the rising water, a friend called from one of the houses, inviting them to come in out of the storm. “No thanks,” the sisters shouted back, “we have to get home to Annie.”
That proved impossible. A few minutes later the La Salle shorted. Thinking they could find shelter behind one of the high dunes, Mona and Joan left the car and started walking. “We got maybe thirty feet,” Mona said, “when we realized we’d forgotten the keys in the ignition. We turned back to retrieve them. The car was gone. The wind picked up everything.”
The Schmids found an old rowboat behind a dune and used it for shelter. They were crouching there when a long black car came down the road driven by a black chauffeur. With him were his sister and his employer, a paraplegic man. Their car stalled, too, and then there were five behind the dune. As luck would have it, a lone telephone pole was still standing near them. The chauffeur found two ropes. He looped one around the pole and then around his group. Mona and Joan refused to be tied down. Joan thought if they were free to swim, they would have a better chance of survival. The water loomed over the dune. “Everyone was praying. I was promising the good Lord everything,” Mona said.
Scenes of devastation were repeated all along the South Shore of Long Island. At Quogue, Southampton, and Water Mill, the inland highway flooded, cutting off Montauk from the rest of the island. A Greenport man driving home from Manhattan was stopped in his tracks: “Where a well-paved state highway ordinarily lay, the Atlantic intervened in all its formidable majesty.” In the village of Westhampton, a mile from shore, water rose to seven feet on Main Street. The Shinnecock Bay Coast Guard Station with its steel lookout tower and hundred-foot radio mast washed into the bay. The guardsmen just managed to reach their boats in time.
At Sag Harbor the great steeple of the Presbyterian church collapsed. The church was more than a hundred feet tall and almost a hundred years old. For generations, a light had always burned in the steeple to guide Long Island whalers and fishermen home from the sea. When the steeple fell, it brought down a tradition that had lasted for decades. In Southampton the beautiful Dune Church was demolished, except for the east wall, inscribed with the biblical quotation “Thou rulest the raging of the sea. Thou stillest the waves thereof when they arise.”
Crossing the Sound
L
ong Island absorbed the first shock of the storm. The long arm that stretches a hundred miles northeastward from New York City acted like an enormous breakwater, protecting most of coastal Connecticut from the worst onslaught. Only the very easterly Connecticut towns, from Old Saybrook to Stonington, and all of Rhode Island faced the open ocean unguarded.
Although it is the rare hurricane that arrives so far north at maximum strength, the few that make it are engines of enormous speed and power. Gordon Dunn called them “the most destructive hurricanes of record since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.” In the sodden September of 1938, New England was a hothouse. The prevailing conditions — high humidity, ocean waters as warm as a bath, and saturated terrain — were a hurricane’s favorite weather, and so it passed from one steam heat to another, replenishing itself as it rushed north.
Landfall usually acts like a brake. A hurricane moves unopposed across the smooth ocean surface because there is nothing to impede its progress. Once the storm reaches land, however, it encounters friction, the force created when one surface tries to move across another. The rougher land terrain, with its myriad obstacles — trees, hills, dunes, buildings — slows and flattens its progress. After traveling over land for 150 miles, a cyclone’s strength and speed are usually cut in half.
Not this time. Gaining rather than losing intensity, the Great Hurricane of 1938 swooped across Long Island Sound and smacked New England. Mountains, valleys, urban sprawl — nothing stopped it. The hurricane was more terrible than anything New England had ever experienced. By four o’clock, the worst winds in a hundred years were battering colonial villages. They cut off power, leaving most of New England in darkness, and toppled weather towers built to gauge it. Great elms and oaks as old as the nation leaned into the wind and lay down. One by one, beautiful lindens and willows fell. The ground was so wet that the wind yanked the ancient trees out, roots and all. By the end of the day, picturesque village greens and lovely Ivy League campuses looked like logging camps.
At Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, minutes after the opening exercises for the new school term concluded, the old stone tower of the chapel blew down. At Tabor Academy, an exclusive prep school on the Massachusetts shore, there was no sign that unusual weather was on the way until half past two. A Tabor teacher described “black, ominous-looking rolls of rain-laden clouds that came up out of the southeast driven by fast-driving winds. By four o’clock the storm was over the school in full, unimagined fury.” The Tabor gym became a swimming pool, and teachers ferried the boys between buildings in racing shells. The water was so high, they tied up at the second floor, and the boys crawled through the windows into their dormitories.
At Northfield Seminary, a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts, a chimney crashed through the ceiling of the dining hall, killing two girls as they ate supper. At Amherst College, Dean Harry N. Glick reported that an otherwise unexceptional group of freshmen taking an IQ test that afternoon scored higher than any class, before or since.
In a satellite photograph, a hurricane appears uniform. No one area looks much different from another. But within the same storm, there are enormous differences and degrees of ferocity. The center, or eye, of the storm is a circle of tranquillity and blue sky, typically forty or fifty miles in diameter. In the relatively tame outer rim, winds may be as weak as thirty or forty miles per hour, strong enough to be disruptive but not disastrous. The terror comes in between, from the eyewall, a swirl of violent thunderstorms and screaming winds surrounding the eye. The heaviest rain falls to the west of the eyewall; the highest winds blow to the east in the area called the dangerous right semicircle. There is no worse place to be. In the Northern Hemisphere, winds blow counterclockwise because of the way the earth spins; so, east of the eye, internal winds are whirling in the same direction as the storm is moving. There, in the dangerous right semicircle, combined winds may be as wild as two hundred miles per hour — sudden destruction when encountered.
The eye of the storm passed over Connecticut between Bridgeport and New Haven in the late afternoon, then swept through New England just west of Hartford and roughly equidistant from New York and Boston. The relatively tame outer rim brushed both cities. In Boston the Braves had just lost the first game of a doubleheader to the St. Louis Cardinals. They were starting the second when the hurricane swiped at the city. It could not have come at a more opportune moment for Vince DiMaggio. In the eighth inning of the first game, DiMaggio had fanned on a fastball from Paul Dean, Dizzy Dean’s kid brother, to tie the National League record for most strikeouts — 113. DiMaggio struck out again at the start of the second game. He was going to make the record books when the game was called.
Down at the Boston Navy Yard, “Old Ironsides” was torn from her anchorage and pummeled. Out at the Boston airport, seventy-five miles from the center of the storm, gale winds knocked down a one-hundred-foot radio tower, cutting off all airto-ground communications, then picked up an eight-ton American Airlines DC-2, flung it across the runway, and dropped it in a salt marsh half a mile away.
Rains from the western side of the eyewall drenched the already waterlogged Connecticut River Valley and western Massachusetts, causing record flooding. One inch of rainfall on an acre of land drops 113 tons of water. Up to seventeen inches — more than 19,000 tons — had fallen on Connecticut and Massachusetts in five days. If the rain had been snow, New England would have been buried under ten feet. Rivers already swollen from weeks of thunderstorms crested. In Hartford, the Connecticut River rose 19.4 feet above flood stage, to 35.4 feet. The Deerfield River rose more than 20 feet. Thousands of volunteers formed assembly lines, piling the riverbanks with sandbags against the rising waters.
Hurricane winds roared through the tobacco farms of the Connecticut River Valley and the mill towns of central Massachusetts, where rivers were already at perilous heights. Placid streams became rushing rivers. Floodwaters washed away roadways and railways. Valley towns were cut off. The rivers that had made New England a vital manufacturing center swept through the mill towns and crushed them. In Norwich, the Thames rose seven feet in one hour and rushed south, carrying the spoils of upstream mill towns. In Ware, a town of fewer than eight thousand, the storm rerouted the normally meandering river. It coursed down Main Street, splitting the village in two. Groceries and mail had to be delivered in baskets strung across the street on pulleys. The floodwater peaked at a record 18.2 feet; when it receded, all that was left of Main Street were the sewer pipes. In Worcester, two old brick factories crumbled under the assault of wind and water.
Under the cover of night, the hurricane sped through the Berkshires. It knocked down 16,000 hardwood trees in Spring-field, Massachusetts; sliced down the maple woods of Vermont; and screeched across the White Mountains of New Hampshire. On Mount Washington, where Jacob’s Ladder on the scenic cog railroad was demolished, winds were clocked at more than a hundred miles per hour.
In New Hampshire, floods and fire turned Peterborough into a charred ruin. When the Contoocook River flooded the business district, electric circuits were shorted and the town’s biggest employers, the Transcript Printing Company and the Farmer’s Grain Company, burned. Fanned by gale winds, flames rushed down Main Street and spread to the neighboring forest. In Weare, located near Concord, the Piscataquog River raced through town after two upstream reservoirs burst. Four women who were standing on a bridge watching the unruly river drowned when the bridge collapsed. In all, thirteen died and 6,000 were left homeless in New Hampshire.
By eight o’clock Wednesday night, Vermont was feeling the hurricane’s might. A husband and wife were enjoying a leisurely dinner in their prefabricated vacation house in the Green Mountains when the lights went out. The roof and walls blew away, never to be found again. The couple finished their dinner alfresco. The hurricane veered west around Burlington and bombarded upstate New Yorkers while they slept. It raised the waters of Lake Champlain, which is 435 square miles, by two feet.
Along the coast, the Cape Cod Canal, which cuts a channel from Buzzards Bay to the ocean, saved much of Massachusetts’ shore from the full fury of the storm. When the tide rose to almost sixteen feet, the canal provided an outlet for the water. It also protected the long hook of Cape Cod. Safeguarded on its inland side by the canal and on the ocean side by steep clay cliffs, the Cape escaped New England’s worst hurricane with little more than a glancing blow.
In New England the full rip of the storm was reserved for the southern shore of Massachusetts, the easternmost beach towns of Connecticut, and all of coastal Rhode Island. There, the ferocity of the storm surpassed even the Great September Gale of 1815 and the legendary Colonial Hurricane of 1635, which the Pilgrims believed was apocalyptic.
The Atlantic Ocean Bound Out of Bed
I
f you blow across a strip of paper, the end will flutter and rise. If you blow harder, the paper will crackle and snap. The same basic law of physics is at work in a hurricane. When a cyclone blusters in from the ocean, it roils the water beneath it. The stronger the winds, the angrier the sea becomes. In the dangerous right semicircle, where the winds are fiercest, the sea is driven with tremendous speed, creating a huge swell of water known as a storm surge.
Meteorologists do not fully understand this phenomenon, but a storm surge may be shaped like a dome, a wall, or a series of enormous waves. A rapid rise in sea level occurs along a shoreline as the eye of the storm makes landfall. The winds propel the sea with such velocity that one wave does not have time to ebb before the next one rushes in. The waves pile up on top of one another, like snow pushed before a plow, and tens of thousands of tons of water crash over the shore.
Like a tsunami, a storm surge is sudden and lethal, especially if it coincides with a high tide. The height of the surge is superimposed on the natural tide, causing a titanic rise that rips loose everything in its path. Within it, acres of debris spin in a furious whirl. Hurricane winds alone are ferocious, but the menace from a storm surge is a thousand times worse. It causes three-fourths of all hurricane deaths.
Sometime near three o’clock, from Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, the sea began to stir. The water came in slowly at first, encroaching on the shore, slithering up beyond the highest high-water mark. It seeped under pilings and oozed through floorboards. Water was everywhere, in places it had never been and could not have reached moments before. While pools of water were gathering in unexpected places, suddenly, to the amazement and disbelief of all who witnessed it, the Atlantic Ocean rose from the bed where it had lain for one hundred years and came ashore. Those who saw the tower of water rising over the sand did not believe what they were seeing. They thought it was a bank of fog, a trick of the storm, a mirage.