The Hurricane
of 1938
By
Herbert F. Janick
The
eastern seaboard of the United States—blessed with abundant rainfall,
relatively mild climate, and few natural calamities—has been
hospitable to a large population. But on occasion nature goes
berserk and
produces a tragedy. Such was the case on September 21, 1938,
when a tropical hurricane, the first since 1815 to visit New
England,
suddenly veered inland, pulverizing Long Island and cutting a
swath across Connecticut. The result was what the Hartford Courant called
the "most calamitous day" in the state's history.
It
was hard for Americans, absorbed with the Munich Conference
and
impending war in Europe, to comprehend fully the enormity of
the disaster. It is even more difficult for present generations
to
appreciate what William Manchester termed "one of the forgotten
fragments of American history." Statistics are cold. Six
hundred eighty-two people were killed, and seven hundred were
injured in New England alone. With respect to property, 4,500
homes, 2,600 boats, and 26,000 automobiles were destroyed. The
total cost of property lost amounted to $400 million.
The
details of the disaster are more graphic. The eastern corner of
the Connecticut coastline adjacent to Rhode Island, not buffered
by Long Island, was hardest hit. New London was devastated by
wind, floods, and fires that raged out of control in the downtown
for over seven hours. Ships torn from their moorings slammed around
the New London harbor, wrecking wharfs before sinking or beaching
themselves. The lighthouse tender Tulip draped its frame
across the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad tracks behind
the Customs House. When the Port Jefferson-Bridgeport ferry that
had spent a harrowing night in Long Island Sound tried to land
the next morning in New London, no docks remained. The Shoreline
Express, filled with passengers from New York bound for Boston,
was marooned outside Stonington on tracks that were underwater.
The rest of Connecticut, particularly the Connecticut River Valley,
suffered terribly from floods. The river and its tributaries,
already swollen by four days of rain, burst their banks. Downtown
Hartford was inundated, and WPA workers built a half-mile dike
of sandbags to protect the Colt factory. Tobacco barns were flattened
in the valley, and the year's crop was ruined.
It
is easier to describe what happened that fateful September day
than it is to explain why the disaster took place. The hurricane
hit at full moon when the tide was its highest. Already powerful,
the whirlwind got caught between two high-pressure systems just
before it moved inland and instead of dissipating, it became more
intense. After almost a week of steady rain, the air over New
England was as moist as that over the ocean, a factor that caused
the storm to reverse the usual pattern and pick up speed overland.
In addition to the natural circumstances, the failure of the Weather
Bureau to give any warning of the storm's potential contributed
to the lack of preparation on the part of New England residents.
Together the combination of chance and human error produced the
most destructive hurricane in Connecticut's history.
For
Further Reading
William
Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (Boston, 1973), skillfully
weaves an account of the storm into his narrative history of the
United States. Everett S. Allen, A Wind to Shake the World
(Boston, 1976), emphasizes human response to the storm. Excellent
photographs of the disaster are in New England Hurricane
produced by the Federal Writers Project of the WPA (Boston, 1938).
*
Entry under revision.
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