N.Y. / Region|Blasé About Hurricane Maps? Remember 1938
N.Y. / Region | Our Towns
Blasé About Hurricane Maps? Remember 1938
By PETER APPLEBOME SEPT. 1, 2010
WESTHAMPTON BEACH, N.Y.
For those few who still remember, the images are seared into their brains: the corpses floating down Main Street or propped up on chairs in the temporary morgue at the Westhampton County Club; the boats that drifted into the living rooms of flooded houses; the dead dogs and featherless chickens; the muck and fish stink; the moonscape of flattened houses on Dune Road; the residue of the last great hurricane to hit Long Island, the storm of 1938.
On a gorgeous end-of-summer afternoon, with those Weather Channel tracking maps likely more worrisome because of rain and wind or imperiled Labor Day parties than for anything more ominous close to home, it's almost impossible to wrap your brain around a major hurricane hitting Long Island.
But as Hurricane Earl churns haphazardly north, and as we begin our seasonal dance of voyeurism, alarm and indifference, there are still people around who remember the last really big one: the Long Island Express of Sept. 21, 1938, which killed more than 50 people on Long Island, 29 of them here, and more than 600 over all.
It's a different world, much safer for people because of better communications and evacuation and rescue plans, but infinitely riskier for property damage, with so much having been built since then. A storm like the one in 1938 would surely be one of the costliest in American history if it hit Long Island. Lest we forget, a few reminders of what happened in the past and what will happen again, sooner or later.
"In our family, we always remembered two things: the Depression and the hurricane," said Jackie Bennett, 76, who still lives about half a mile from the ocean here. "You talk to people today buying property on Dune Road, and they have no clue. No clue. They all think it's something that happens somewhere else."
A house's remains after the 1938 hurricane in Westhampton, N.Y. Credit The New York Times
So she remembers the way her father, a car dealer, went off in his wrecker to rescue a stranded car in the lull when the eye passed over. Before long, he saw a tidal wave of water roaring toward him in a great gray mass. He turned his truck around, trying to outrun it, until he abandoned the truck on Main Street. Now it is a stretch of ice cream shops, cafes and expensive boutiques; then it was a roiling sea of floating cars and boats, dead animals and people swimming for their lives.
He eventually made it home, where a friend's yacht had crashed through the glass front door and lodged in the hedge between his yard and the Episcopal church next door. The family's grand piano, which took six men to lift, had sailed across the room like a cork; the prized tropical-fish tanks were smashed to bits; and an entire house from across the creek was resting on the sidewalk by the back door.
Conrad Teller, now the mayor, then a fourth grader, remembers being in music class, a window flying off and breaking apart on the piano as his teacher played on without missing a beat. His father was the police chief, who watched as his patrol cars washed away. He was later lifted by the tide onto the arms of a telephone pole and then onto the top of a house until the storm finally moved on.
Mr. Teller figures that people today have more information, but not necessarily more sense. "All the publicity and hype," he said, "I think it just dulls people after a while. After a while, they just tune it out."
The progress of the 1938 storm was unusual. After meandering toward Cape Hatteras, it accelerated forward at 60 to 70 miles per hour, as if racing toward Long Island. It hit land as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 121 m.p.h., gusts of 183 m.p.h. and 15-foot storm surges.
There have been other hurricanes since then — Hurricane Bob, which mostly missed Long Island, in 1991; Hurricane Gloria in 1985, a Category 1 storm that was the last one to hit Long Island; good-size storms like Hurricane Donna in 1960, and Carol and Edna in 1954.
But going back in the imperfect historic record of coastal storms, there are believed to have been at least five epic hurricanes — in 1938, 1893, 1821, 1815 and 1635. One theory is that they repeat every 70 to 80 years. It likely won't be this storm. It might not be this year. But it will almost certainly happen again, no matter how many masters of the universe build seaside monuments on terrain where nothing will last forever.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2010, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Blasé About the Weather Channel's Maps? Remember 1938. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe