1938 New England Hurricane: The Long Island Express

The 1938 New England hurricane, also called the Great Hurricane of 1938 or the Long Island Express, struck Long Island and southern New England on the afternoon of 21 September 1938. Racing north with almost no warning, it killed roughly 680–800 people, drowned coastal communities under a huge storm surge and flattened forests far inland. It remains one of the most destructive storms in the history of the north-eastern United States.

Background

Major hurricanes rarely reach New England, and by 1938 none had struck the region with full force in living memory. Many people did not believe such a storm could happen there. Long Island’s south shore and the Rhode Island coast were lined with summer houses on low barrier beaches, many still occupied in late September.

Forecasting at the time relied on reports from ships and coastal weather stations; there were no satellites or weather radar, and aircraft reconnaissance of hurricanes had not yet begun.

The storm’s path

The hurricane formed in the eastern Atlantic in mid-September and became a powerful Category 5 storm north of the Caribbean. As it approached the US East Coast it was expected to curve harmlessly out to sea, as such storms often do.

Instead, it was caught between a high-pressure system over the Atlantic and a low over the eastern United States, and steered almost straight north. Its forward speed rose to around 100 km/h (60 mph) or more, among the fastest ever recorded for a hurricane. This speed added to the wind strength on its eastern side and gave people almost no time to prepare.

The storm also arrived at the worst possible time. It coincided with a high astronomical tide, near the autumn equinox and a new moon, so the storm surge came on top of water that was already unusually high. Heavy rain in the days before had saturated the ground and filled rivers across New England.

The forecast failure

The US Weather Bureau in Washington issued only general storm warnings. According to accounts of the day, a junior forecaster, Charles Pierce, argued that the storm would head north, but senior staff expected it to turn east. Whatever happened inside the bureau, the public received no clear hurricane warning before the storm came ashore.

Ships at sea had reported the hurricane’s position and power, and the Jacksonville office of the Weather Bureau tracked it as it passed Florida. But responsibility passed to Washington as the storm moved north, and the warnings issued there spoke only of gales. Newspapers and radio stations on the morning of 21 September carried little or no hint of danger. Many people on the coast went about their day until the sea began to rise around them.

Landfall

The hurricane struck Suffolk County on Long Island in the early to mid-afternoon (around 2:30 pm) as a Category 3 storm, with a central pressure of about 946 millibars measured near Bellport. A storm surge of several metres crashed over the barrier beaches. At Westhampton Beach, most of the beach houses were swept away and some 29 people died. The sea cut new channels through the dunes, including what became Shinnecock Inlet.

The storm crossed Long Island Sound and hit the Connecticut and Rhode Island shore. The east side of the storm, where winds and surge were strongest, devastated Rhode Island. At Napatree Point in Westerly, a row of summer homes vanished and many of their occupants were killed.

Survivors described the surge as a wall of water, sometimes mistaken for a fog bank as it approached. Houses were lifted from their foundations and carried inland or out to sea. In Connecticut, coastal towns such as Old Saybrook, Stonington and New London were badly hit, and fire broke out on the New London waterfront while the storm was still raging.

Providence and inland New England

The surge funnelled up Narragansett Bay into Providence. Downtown streets were flooded to more than 3 m (10 ft) deep in places, trapping office workers and shoppers.

Inland, the hurricane brought ferocious winds and heavy rain on top of earlier downpours. The Blue Hill Observatory near Boston recorded a gust of about 300 km/h (186 mph). Rivers such as the Connecticut flooded towns including Hartford and Springfield. Across Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, the wind uprooted vast numbers of trees, felling an estimated 2 billion or more board feet of timber.

Damage and toll

Estimates of the death toll range from about 680 to 800, most of them drowned on the coast. Around 57,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, along with thousands of boats, and many roads, bridges and railway lines were cut. The damage was estimated at about $300 million in 1938 dollars, a huge figure during the Great Depression.

The federal government set up the Northeastern Timber Salvage Administration to recover fallen timber and reduce the fire risk. Workers from New Deal programmes helped clear forests and roads.

Power and telephone lines came down across the region, isolating many towns for days, and washouts and debris closed the New Haven Railroad’s shore line between New York and Boston. Among the many summer houses destroyed was the Hepburn family home at Fenwick, in Old Saybrook, Connecticut; the actress Katharine Hepburn, who was there that day, escaped with her family as the house was swept away.

By the numbers

Consequences and legacy

The hurricane changed the New England coast. Many barrier-beach communities were never rebuilt in the same form, and new inlets and shifted dunes remain features of the shoreline. Inland, the felled forests changed the look of the landscape for decades, and salvage of the timber continued into the early 1940s.

The disaster helped spur improvements in the Weather Bureau’s hurricane forecasting and warning service, including better communication between offices. When further hurricanes struck New England in 1944 and 1954, warnings were more timely, though the 1954 storms led to new calls for physical protection. Providence’s Fox Point Hurricane Barrier and similar barriers at New Bedford and Stamford were built in the 1960s.

The 1938 hurricane also became part of regional memory, recorded in photographs, newsreels, books and oral histories, and it is still used as a benchmark for what a major hurricane could do to the densely populated north-east today.

Timeline

• Mid-September 1938: The hurricane forms in the eastern Atlantic.
• 19-20 September 1938: It passes north of the Caribbean as a Category 5 storm.
• 21 September 1938, morning: It races north off the Carolinas.
• 21 September 1938, afternoon: It makes landfall on Long Island.
• 21 September 1938, late afternoon: The surge floods the Rhode Island coast and downtown Providence.
• 21-22 September 1938: The storm crosses New England into Canada.
• 1966: The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier is completed in Providence.

Why it matters

The 1938 hurricane showed that New England was not safe from major hurricanes and exposed the limits of forecasting before radar and satellites. It drove improvements in the Weather Bureau’s hurricane service and, after later storms, the building of coastal flood barriers. Like the Galveston hurricane of 1900, it is remembered as a storm that caught a confident coast unprepared, and its lessons were recalled when Hurricane Sandy struck the same region in 2012.