Sudden Sea (9 page)
A confidential report on the state of the U.S. Weather Bureau completed in January 1938 cited an “urgent need for modernization.” Warning that the agency lacked a solid scientific basis, the report stated:
The Forecast Division, while reasonably efficient administratively, does not have a technical staff, not even one person formally trained as a scientist. At the present time, there is a complete lack of any plan or method for systematic training of would-be official forecasters. It is a sorry state of affairs when candidates for such a responsible position are obliged to shift for themselves, picking up scraps of information as best they can. Unless a drastic change of policy is affected, it is certain that the Weather Bureau can progress only to a very limited extent and consequently will be deficient in the performance of its duty to render the best possible service to the public.
By September, few if any of the recommended changes had been implemented. Promising young candidates such as Pierce received no formal instruction. Sitting in on a forecast meeting was as close to on-the-job training as they got. Junior forecasters submitted “practice” forecasts, which were then compared with the official outlook. For ambitious young analysts, the meetings were a time to score points. But if their maps were off a degree or less, if they differed from the official weather map, or if their conclusions were weakly grounded, they could feel disconcertingly like Christians in the Colosseum.
When the noon meeting convened, Pierce’s forecast was clearly at odds with the prevailing outlook. To justify his radically different analysis, he had drawn his charts precisely, and he pointed out a couple of peculiar features. First, he cited the
Carinthia
’s dangerous low-pressure reading. It indicated that the storm was still a full-blown hurricane. Second, he noted, the Bermuda High was in an unusual position. It had sidled north to latitude 44°. Normally in September, it was around latitude 30–35°. According to his calculations, the misplaced High would draw the storm north. Analyses of upper-air patterns supported his contention. To the west, a second front hung over the Alleghenies. Between the parallel systems, a valley of low pressure extended from New England to the Carolinas. This moist low-pressure channel had turned the Northeast into a steam bath. After four days of unrelenting rain and oppressive humidity, New England was as close to the tropics as it ever got. The trough was an open invitation to a tropical cyclone.
Pierce thought his charts pointed to a disaster in the making. A storm of hurricane force was hightailing it out of North Carolina and speeding up the Atlantic coast. If it was blocked from going to sea by the unusual location of the Bermuda High and blocked from blowing west by the parallel front over the Alleghenies, it would be sucked into the inviting channel between them. Like a toboggan in a chute, it would have an unrestricted speed zone leading directly into the heart of New England.
If Pierce assumed that anyone reading his charts would reach a similar conclusion, he was sadly mistaken. In the opinion of the D.C. veterans, the brash young man was whistling Dixie. Charles Mitchell, chief of forecasting at the Bureau, was beyond a doubt the best forecaster in the Washington station — some would argue the best in the entire Weather Bureau. Short in stature, he had a long, oval face; a broad, domed forehead; and receding gray hair that he plastered down and combed to the side. His tongue was as sharp as the part in his hair.
Mitchell considered the young upstart through his wire-rimmed pince-nez. He had been predicting the weather since Pierce was in knickers. Backed by his senior forecast team, he dismissed the storm as a typical Cape Verde blow. The pattern was predictable. The cyclone would continue its curve and curl out to sea, where it would dwindle to a gale in the cold northern waters. A hurricane happened in balmy Gulf waters or the sultry Caribbean, not north of the Forty-third Parallel in icebound New England. Water temperatures there rarely reach 79°, the minimum needed to sustain a tropical cyclone.
Mitchell and his men had tracked dozens of Atlantic hurricanes, and none of them had ever made landfall north of Cape May. Furthermore, the system was weakening. Overnight it had gone from a Category 5 to a Category 3. They were counting on the high-pressure bank over the Alleghenies to hold the storm offshore while it continued making its predictable turn to the sea. It would peter out completely as it moved into the polar latitudes. The hurricane was a “one-hundred-year storm,” they assured Pierce — all show and no action. In other words, the odds that it would strike land were a hundred to one.
Experience and precedent were on Mitchell’s side. The evidence supported Pierce. The
Carinthia
’s low-pressure reading and the unusual northern position of the Bermuda High were clear alarms, but the veteran forecasters could not believe what was in front of their eyes. Experience trumped facts. As of September 21, 1938, New England had experienced only two major hurricanes in its three-hundred-year history. If it hadn’t happened in more than a century, what were the odds it would happen today?
The Great September Gale of 1815
The last hurricane to reach New England was the Great September Gale of 1815. Described as the worst natural disaster “since the settlement of the country,” the gale flattened New York and New England. Meadows close to the shoreline were covered in so much sand, they looked like beaches, and newspapers did not have enough columns to list all the ships that were lost.
In Reading, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson lost the steeple of his church. In Amherst, lexicographer Noah Webster lost most of his apple orchards, and in Concord six-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes lost his favorite pantaloons. He remembered the loss years later in a poem:
Lord! how the ponds and rivers boiled!
They seemed like bursting craters!
And oaks lay scattered on the ground
As if they were p’taters
And all above was in a howl,
And all below a clatter,
The earth was like a frying-pan,
Or some such hissing matter.
It chanced to be our washing-day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the shirts and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept, —
I lost my Sunday breeches!
I saw them straddling through the air,
Alas! too late to win them;
I saw them chase the clouds, as if
The devil had been in them;
They were my darlings and my pride,
My boyhood’s only riches, —
“Farewell, farewell,” I faintly cried, —
“My breeches! O my breeches!”
That night I saw them in my dreams,
How changed from what I knew them!
The dews had steeped their faded threads,
The winds had whistled through them!
I saw the wide and ghastly rents
Where demon claws had torn them;
A hole was in their amplest part,
As if an imp had worn them.
I have had many happy years,
And tailors kind and clever,
But those young pantaloons have gone
Forever and forever!
And not till fate has cut the last
Of all my earthly stitches,
This aching heart shall cease to mourn
My loved, my long-lost breeches!
In Stonington, Connecticut, the tide rose seventeen feet higher than the highest tide and swept across the town. Everything was washed from the wharves, and then the wharves themselves were demolished. Neighboring Napatree — or Nap-o-tree, as it was called in 1815 — was densely forested. The September Gale wiped it clean, and no tree has grown there since.
Reginald E. Peck related in
Early Landholders of Watch Hill:
“Dame Nature smote the coast with a terrible gale which did irreparable damage from which the shore line never recovered. It was this gale which denuded the Naps of its thick woods and reduced it in size to its present width.”
Another local commentator, the Reverend Frederic A. Denison, described “the big wind” in
Westerly and Its Witnesses:
“The ocean wave, raised by the gale, rose ten feet along the coast from the shore meadows, and swelled the river [Pawcatuck] nine feet above its usual height at the head of tidewater. Two porpoises were driven up into the village. The spray from the sea was driven far back into the country [and] all the forests on the coast were prostrated.”
Narragansett Bay surged over its banks, washing away the stores on Newport’s Long Wharf Street and killing a family of five. In Providence, 11.9 feet of water turned the downtown area into a lake, and four ships, nine brigs, seven schooners, and fifteen sloops were carried away. Moses Brown, a leading Rhode Island merchant, was said to have lost $1 million, a kingly sum. Virtually the entire downtown had to be rebuilt, which turned out to be a boon. Substantial brick buildings replaced the ram-shackle warehouses. At the foot of College Hill, Providence, on a corner of the Old Market House, a plaque marks the high-water point. The record of 11.9 feet stood for 122 years and 363 days — until September 21, 1938.
After the storm, Long Island neighbors Daniel Hopping and William Miller were comparing their losses. “Well, Mr. Miller,” said Hopper, “the Lord was in my field of corn the other night.” “That may be true,” Miller replied, “but the Devil was in mine.”
On September 21, 1938, history would repeat itself. The simi larities between 1815 and 1938 are extraordinary. Both the Great September Gale and the Great Hurricane were born off the Cape Verde Islands, followed virtually identical paths from the Bahamas, and made landfall on Long Island within ten miles of each other. Both came at the end of unusually wet and humid summers. June 1938 was the third-wettest in New England weather records, and the September rains left the region waterlogged. The two storms struck when it was both high tide and the highest tide of the year — during the autumnal equinox, when the sun and moon are aligned with the earth, causing a double gravitational pull and producing the highest tides.
On September 23, 1815, and again on September 21, 1938, everything in nature — temperature, tides, air currents, and seasonal rainfall — conspired to make New England the perfect place for a hurricane.
Upside Down, Inside Out
U
sually September is New England’s golden month — brilliant days, breezy nights, and the sweet dream of an Indian summer. Temperatures are mellow, warm but without the intense heat of July and August. Zinnias, dahlias, and goldenrod are in bloom, the last of the berries are bright on the bush, and overhead the first trace of autumn colors the trees. Fat puffs of cumulus drift across the sky, and off the coast striped bass and tuna swim in crowded schools. The occasional gale, or “line storm,” that sends breakers crashing onto rocky coasts and vaulting sea-walls adds a quotient of drama to the glorious days.
But the summer of ’38 had been miserable. Weeks had been either soggy or scorching. Record rains in June and July, record heat in August. No one could remember a worse season. Twenty-seven August days had been hotter than normal, and long after dark, families sat out on porches and stoops, fanning themselves with folded newspapers, trying to catch a breeze. Women hiked their skirts up over their knees, and men stripped to their undershirts while children slept on screened-in porches, hair plastered against flushed cheeks.
In September the rains had returned, bringing muggy, gray days of on-again, off-again showers. Nothing dried, body and spirit felt permanently dampened, and mildew sprouted everywhere — on bread, in grouting, on the clothes in the hamper. Spirits sagged. Hair frizzed. Summer tans faded. Sewers clogged.
By mid-month, the weather was upside down, inside out — monsoons in Hartford, tropical heat in Newport — and the Atlantic felt like a bathtub. Across the Northeast, dismal days turned to deluges. The drenching had started on Saturday, the seventeenth of September: Drizzle in the morning. A noontime thunderclap. Thunderstorms again for dinner. A downpour through the night. Rain, rain, and more rain for four days straight. Sunday had dropped 3 inches on eastern Long Island and 2.5 inches on Hartford. The Connecticut River rose to precarious levels. Monday brought more of the same. In New York City the workweek began in a dense fog. Skyscrapers dissolved in the ether, while the city below steamed under 100 percent humidity. Rumbling thunderstorms at noon and again at rush hour brought no relief. The total rainfall for the day, 1.8 inches, equaled the rain in Hartford, and another 1.5 inches fell overnight. More than 3 inches soaked both Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Tuesday had been even wetter: 3 inches in Bridgehampton, Long Island; 5.36 inches in New Haven; another 3.5 inches in Hartford; 5.6 inches in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. Around Hartford, the Connecticut River rose a foot every three or four hours. Quiet tributaries became white-water rapids. Dams burst. In Willimantic the river flooded, severely damaging the American Thread Company, the town’s major employer. Overnight another 3.2 inches fell in Hartford, bringing the total to more than 6 inches in twenty-four hours. Connecticut and Massachusetts braced themselves for even more rain. Corner grocers commiserated with customers. Neighbors fretted over back fences. Conversations were as predictable as the day’s forecast.
Wet enough for you? Never saw a September like this one. What is the world coming to? Just imagine if this were snow.
After such a sustained drenching, the most unusual thing about Wednesday, the twenty-first, was the appearance of the sun in southern New England. It seemed like a perfect morning for a picnic on the rocks, a game of golf, or hanging the laundry out to dry. In hindsight, though, the morning would seem too perfect, the perfection itself a presage. The absence of gulls, the cirrus clouds, the preternatural stillness, the exceptionally long ocean swells, were all portents that no one read in time. The colors of the day were a tip-off, too, and the voice of the wind.
