1938 new england hurricane damage

Upstairs on the front of the building we had one large bedroom where all 4 of us slept. something in the air, like a kind of suspension was about to end.”Cawley thought he was merely reading the social weather of the times: there were still some 10.5 million Americans out of work, and President Roosevelt had just recently declared the beginning of “the real drive on the Depression.”Fishermen and bathers in Narragansett Bay noticed that the light had developed a peculiar yellow tint. Seconds later, Jimmy was thrown from his makeshift raft and disappeared.In a matter of seconds at Watch Hill, the yacht club, a public bathhouse, and 39 cottages were ripped from Napatree Point and swept toward the Connecticut shore across the mouth of the Pawcatuck River.

They had found him stark naked and full of sea water. As authorizing calls were placed to Washington, Cawley sat down to write his first-person account. “But we never leave the protected bay,” he adds soberly.

It was the kind of fine morning people had been waiting for all summer.As the fishing fleet put out from harbors up and down the coast, sailboats appeared in Little Narragansett Bay, and college boys hired to close up the big summer houses of Watch Hill stripped off their shirts. My dad was farm manager for Ferncliff farm on the hills just west of West Hartford.

It brought down 20,00…

By this time I was in school and was able to read about the whole thing.Thank you. In its path lay the richest industrialized seaboard in the world — and 13 million unsuspecting people.In Westhampton a farmer saw the roof of his chicken house peeled off in an instant and 1,200 hens vanish in a deafening swirl of debris — house shutters, business awnings, tree limbs. In seconds all of Long Island’s phones were dead and power was out. In New Hampshire alone, one and a half billion board feet of timber were knocked down; the recovery of “storm” lumber would take years. After that, the group drove toward Watch Hill, but the road was soon under water. my brother Albert and grandparents were pacing the floors and waiting. Other than that we were very lucky as the rest of the buildings held up.

About two years earlier that silo had developed a slight lean,so it they had added 3 heavy steel cables to keep it from leaning any more. His story broke on the front page of the Washington, D.C., Evening Star that afternoon.“I reached the outside world today after witnessing the scenes of horror and desolation that came in the hours after a tidal wave, hurled miles inland by a hurricane, engulfed Westerly, Rhode Island, my home, two days ago.“I counted bodies — row upon sickening row of them — stretched out in the old town high school after all the city’s morgues were filled. The next thing I really remember was 3-4 years later my parents purchased a book about the Great New England Hurricane. The weather cleared dramatically. While I knew a lot of the information, there were some stories, that I’d never heard before.

As he watched, trees planted in the town’s park before the Revolutionary War were uprooted or toppled over “like bowling pins, one after the other.” Right in front of him, a postman was picked up and dashed into a light pole.Stan Higginbotham called home to see if his mother and dad and brother had gone back to the beach, praying they hadn’t. The stories are living history of New England.This setting should only be used on your home or work computer. It was easier to know where a tropical storm wasn’t, it was often said with amusement, than where a tropical storm was.At about 2:15 that afternoon, a Long Island fisherman saw a huge fog bank rolling in fast from the ocean.

The impact of the storm would register on a seismograph in Sitka, Alaska. About 700 people died 75 years ago when the storm known variously as the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 or the Long Island Express began … Finally, near the end of his life, Harold moved to Massachusetts and found a position at a mill. For a pension Harold was given a modest $1,000 — or about $500 less than he needed to bury his wife and youngest son. It is estimated that, if an identical hurricane had struck in 2005, it would have caused $39.2 billion in damage due to changes in population and infrastructure. Dogs chained to posts had gone mad trying to free themselves.