Sudden Sea (23 page)

Roadways were sand dunes. Entire communities were stacks of kindling. The few telephone poles still standing were clotheslines, their crossbars hung with blankets, ribbons of seaweed, and clothing. Bonfires burned on the beaches to clean up the mess. Landmarks that had stood long before anyone could remember had vanished, and along the shores of ponds and bays, white muslin flags, each with a red cross, fluttered in the light breeze. Every flag marked the location of a body to be picked up.

Although houses broke up, much of their furnishings stayed intact, and on Thursday the coastline looked like a vast yard sale. Along the edges of salt ponds and marshes, in pastures and fields, there were chairs and tables and tennis racquets, bureaus and refrigerators.

A Westhampton woman said the scene Thursday morning defied description. “Devastation everywhere, debris, smelly mud, furniture, cars, lumber and big chunks of houses, boats, trees, all jumbled and tangled in mountainous heaps, and scattered everywhere. Yachts stuck in hedges, buildings broken and twisted, the dunes flattened, almost devoid of the beautiful summer cottages we took such pride in, and ocean waves breaking in the bay where the inlets had broken through the dunes. It was all but impossible to comprehend such devastation, let alone figure out how to begin to clean it up.”

What the eye saw, the mind could not process and the heart refused to accept. The reality of this morning seemed disconnected from the memory of yesterday morning. Even the birds seemed disoriented. One Rhode Island man said, “They came out — what birds were left — but they seemed spooky. They were as still as could be. They didn’t sing or anything.” Another man said: “They were flying around in groups as if they were thinking of migrating.” A gannet, an ocean bird whose habitat is the North Atlantic, and tropical yellow-billed birds native to the West Indies were spotted in Vermont.

The hurricane turned back the clock to a time when homes were lit by candlelight, meals were cooked in the fireplace, and walking was the most reliable mode of travel. Much of Connecticut and Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island were marooned. Transportation did not exist. Five Massachusetts Supreme Court judges who had set out from Springfield to Boston, a distance of one hundred miles, on Wednesday morning finally arrived in a National Guard truck convoy Friday night.

Without power or phone lines, even neighboring towns were cut off from each other. It was days before the scope of the disaster was understood. In much of the stricken area, the only communication with the outside world was by shortwave radio. Amateur hams Wilson Burgess and George Marshall radioed from Westerly, signaling the Red Cross for disaster relief, the State House for soldiers, and the utility companies for linemen. They stayed at their radio through the night and received the William S. Paley Amateur Radio Award for their efforts.

Driving was hazardous. Roads were buried beneath sand or blocked by trees and debris. Without electricity, service stations could not pump gas. Train service was derailed completely. The New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad reported that “seventy-five miles of silent track hung at crazy angles over yawning chasms, in a hopeless jumble of power lines, signal towers, houses, boats and thousands of tons of debris.” Thirty-one bridges and two hundred culverts were washed out, moved from their abutments or demolished. Five thousand men worked in shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to restore service so that vital goods and relief supplies could get in. Many of the railroad workers ate and slept in the Pullman cars that had stalled on the tracks. In the meantime, the navy battleship USS
Wyoming
carried the mail between New York and Boston.

Telephone service was equally chaotic. According to Bell Telephone Company figures, more than 500,000 phones were dead in some 350 communities, major cable routes were destroyed, and so many miles of telephone, telegraph, and power lines were down they could stretch four-fifths of the way around the world. Seventy-two million feet of wire, 400 miles of cable, 31,000 poles, and 18,000 crossarms had to be replaced. Telephone workers streamed in from as far away as Nebraska. Urgent calls from New York and Washington were routed by undersea cable to London and then relayed back across the Atlantic to wireless stations on eastern Cape Cod.

The weather remained glorious for the rest of September. “Everything was beautifully clean after that,” one man remembered. “The next day and the next few weeks you never saw the air so clean. At night, you could see stars you never could see before. It made me respect nature a heck of a lot. In fact, I feel Mother Nature does that every once in a while — like washing an old dirty shirt.” But the landscape was barren.

Autumn never came to New England in 1938. The region passed from summer to the bleakness of winter in a few hours. Trees were stripped bare. Vegetation was dead. The few sorry bits of verdure that remained were burned brown because the hurricane had rained salt water. Whatever green there was lay prostrate, a horizontal jungle of lost majesty — great maples, oaks, and elms, the pride of many colonial towns, fallen.

Trude Crombe of Rhode Island said, “Leaves weren’t just blown off trees — the juices were sucked out of them like a vacuum cleaner would draw it right up.” A Jamestown woman wrote to a friend: “Besides the tragic loss of life, homes and property, much of the beauty of the island is gone. The coast line stands stark and naked.” A Long Island woman wrote to her mother: “We are having beautiful weather and lovely moonlight nights, but in spite of that, the place seems dead.”

In the country, the odor of crushed foliage filled the air. Trees that had held against the storm stood like remnants of a lost battalion. Along the beaches and in the flooded cities, the stench of rotting sea creatures and sewage was revolting. Pedestrians in downtown Providence shared the sidewalk with rats as big as tomcats. Food and water sources were contaminated. Cars and corpses filled coves, ponds, and bays. In farms across New England, chickens fluttered featherless wings. The wind had plucked them clean. Salt and sap were everywhere, clouding windows, sticking to walls, corroding cars. Copper screens turned green.

“It was easy to trace the boundary line where the storm surge had stopped,” Lee Davis, the Westhampton doctor’s son, recalled. “Oceanward from it, everything was coated with a dark, almost lavender layer of silt, a combination of sand and bay mud, plastered together and then blasted onto the surface of grass, shrubs, wreckage, homes, cars. There was death everywhere — of people, of comfort, of predictability, of yesterday. Nothing would ever return to the way it had been a mere morning ago.”

In the face of such devastation, cleaning up, rebuilding, and starting over seemed insurmountable tasks. President Roosevelt dispatched 100,000 relief workers from the WPA, Civilian Conservation Corps, army, and Coast Guard. Boy Scouts and volunteers joined relief workers from the Red Cross. (Some Red Cross teams were delayed because they had been transferred to Florida when the hurricane threatened the southern coast.)

There was a run on axes and shingles. The sound of saws day and night replaced the voice of the wind. After so many years of depression, unemployment ended overnight. There was enough cleanup work for everyone.

In the wake of the storm, reporters descended on the D.C. Weather Bureau looking for answers, and letters — some angry, some perplexed — poured in. Gordon Dunn fired off a report to the Weather Bureau chief defending Jacksonville’s actions. “If the hurricane had maintained its west-northwest course, it would have found Florida prepared as never before,” he noted. “Warnings issued for the North Carolina coast were timely and accurate.”

From Long Island, Ernest Clowes, the amateur weather watcher, sent a furious letter to Washington protesting “the total lack of warnings.” “No one remembers such a wreck here. Yet our forecast was just gale warnings such as happen maybe half a dozen times every winter.” John Q. Stewart, a Princeton physicist who was in northern New England when the hurricane struck, wrote in
Harper’s
magazine: “In the long and laudable annals of the government’s forecasters, that day’s record makes what must be the sorriest page. There had been no warning worth the mentioning: telephones and coast guards were scarcely called to service. A sophisticated population died by the hundreds with little or no knowledge of what raw shape of death this was which struck from the sky and the tide.”

The Weather Bureau countered by pointing out that it had issued seventeen warnings and that in twelve of them, the storm was designated a hurricane. The Bureau failed to note that virtually all twelve had emanated from Jacksonville. Defending Wash-ington’s performance, C. C. Clark, acting director there, blamed the extraordinary velocity of the storm. Once it left Cape Hatteras, the hurricane tripled its speed, dashing six hundred miles in twelve hours. In a response to Ernest Clowes’s letter, Clark wrote: “Had the storm not moved with such unprecedented rapidity, there can be no doubt but that Weather Bureau warnings by radio and through the press would have reached nearly everyone in the affected area.”

Unappeased, Clowes dispatched a second adamant letter: “It seems to me that the whole virtue of good forecasting is not merely to predict the obvious but to predict the exceptional. This was an exceptional storm [and it] called for exceptional rather than somewhat routine assumptions, judgment, and decisions.” Clowes blamed senior D.C. forecasters for the failure, among them “my good friend Mr. Mitchell.”

While publicly the Weather Bureau insisted it was blameless, behind the scenes a major shake-up was under way. In an effort “to greatly strengthen” the agency, F. W. Reichelderfer, a navy commander with a take-no-prisoners attitude, was appointed chief. Carl G. A. Rossby, a noted meteorologist at MIT, was brought in as assistant chief, a new position, and given a mandate to develop a research and training program. Charles Pierce, the only forecaster to recognize the danger, received a promotion and was moved to the analysis division. He remained with the Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) for the rest of his career.

The shake-up did not still the storm of controversy inside or outside the Weather Bureau. In the D.C. station, fourteen frustrated forecasters signed their own reorganization plan and presented it to the new chief. The signatories wrote: “This plan of reorganization of the Forecast Room is based on a conception of the forecaster as a scientist, executing a scientific duty or working on a scientific problem — namely forecasting of weather.” They urged that “the Forecast Room in the interest of morale and efficiency should be considered and administered as a scientific laboratory.”

The most scathing critique of all came from Gardner Emmons, assistant professor of meteorology at New York University, meteorologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and coauthor of the January memorandum on the need to modernize the Bureau. Writing in
The Collecting Net
(a meteorological journal) in March of 1939, he charged that the deadly storm surge could have been predicted. Emmons criticized Jacksonville for assuming that the storm would curve to the northeast. Given the placement of the Bermuda High, he argued, “It is difficult to see how the storm could have been expected to veer out to sea off Hatteras. It would have been more logical to anticipate a movement straight up the Atlantic Coast.” Emmons directed his sharpest words at Washington. “No advices to interested parties to stand by for possible hurricane warnings were given out, as was done earlier in the week by the Jacksonville forecast center.” Referring to Charles Mitchell, he concluded: “Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the whole affair is that the official forecaster who made this seemingly inexcusable error of judgment is beyond all doubts the best forecaster at the Washington forecast center, if not the best in the entire Weather Bureau. How can his disastrous failure to make a timely and correct diagnosis be accounted for?”

Commander Reichelderfer circulated Emmons’s article among the senior forecasters, asking for their comments. Mitchell scrawled in answer, “Mr. Emmons went off half-cocked it seems to me.”

Sixty-five years later, defenses, accusations, explanations, and analyses of the missed forecast are still being made. But no matter which side you come down on, the shortest and truest answer is that the Great New England Hurricane simply outran the forecasters. It was too fast for the men in the Weather Bureau and the limited resources they had in 1938. As a result, 682 people died and another 1,754 were seriously injured.

Maine was the only New England state without a fatality. Eighty-eight died in Massachusetts, ninety in Connecticut, twelve in New Hampshire, and seven in Vermont. One person drowned in New York City, a hitchhiker in Queens who tried to swim away after the car that picked him up stalled. More than fifty died on Long Island, including twenty-nine in the Westhampton Beach area. “It was a great relief to find friends who had survived,” Mona Schmid remembered. “There were so many funerals — every day a funeral, and Long Island was nothing compared with Rhode Island.”

More than half of the dead — 433 — were in Rhode Island, the greatest toll along the beaches of South County. Nancy Allen Holst, a forest ranger, Red Cross volunteer, and pilot, flew her plane along the shoreline because it was easier to see the bodies from the air. Many people had put on their boots to slog through the water, she explained. The boots filled with water and weighed the bodies down so that only the tops of their heads were visible. When Holst spotted a corpse, she zoomed down, and a boat would go out to retrieve it.

Herbert Rathbun, just out of Dartmouth in June, was the official coroner for the Westerly area. In the wake of the hurricane, the town council informed him, “Somebody’s got to collect the bodies and you’re it.”

“We usually brought the bodies in on a door,” Rathbun recalled. “I laid them out in rows on the high school floor and tied a tag around the wrist or ankle.” The governor dispatched undertakers to South County so embalming could keep pace with the discovery of corpses. Still there was a shortage of caskets and embalming fluid.