1938 New England hurricane

Based on Wikipedia: 1938 New England hurricane

The Day the Weather Bureau Got It Wrong

On the morning of September 21, 1938, a twenty-eight-year-old junior forecaster named Charles Pierce stood in front of his superiors at the United States Weather Bureau in Washington and told them something they didn't want to hear. A massive hurricane, he argued, was about to slam directly into New England.

They overruled him.

By that evening, nearly seven hundred people were dead, fifty-seven thousand homes lay in ruins, and two billion trees had been knocked flat across the Northeast. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 remains the most powerful storm ever to strike New York and New England—a catastrophe that arrived with almost no warning because the men in charge couldn't imagine it happening.

Born Off Africa, Bound for Disaster

The storm that would devastate the American Northeast began its life twelve days earlier and four thousand miles away, spinning up from a cluster of thunderstorms off the coast of West Africa on September 9th. This is the classic birthplace of Atlantic hurricanes—warm waters, unstable air, and the rotation of the Earth conspiring to create something monstrous.

The Weather Bureau didn't even know the storm existed until a week later. Ships crossing the Atlantic were sparse that September, and weather satellites wouldn't exist for another two decades. On September 16th, vessels northeast of Puerto Rico finally radioed back reports of violent winds and churning seas. By then, the hurricane was already a mature, well-organized killer tracking westward toward the Bahamas.

It kept getting stronger. By September 19th, the storm had intensified into what meteorologists today would classify as a Category 5 hurricane—the most powerful designation on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with sustained winds of one hundred sixty miles per hour. This scale, which ranks hurricanes from Category 1 (relatively weak, with winds of seventy-four to ninety-five miles per hour) up to Category 5 (catastrophic, with winds exceeding one hundred fifty-seven miles per hour), wouldn't be invented until 1971. But the 1938 storm didn't need a rating to prove its fury.

The Cold Front That Changed Everything

Here's where the meteorology gets interesting—and where the forecasters went wrong.

Most hurricanes that approach the eastern seaboard of the United States follow a predictable pattern. They curve northward along the coast, then bend northeast and head harmlessly out into the open Atlantic. This happens because of something called the Bermuda High, a semi-permanent area of high atmospheric pressure that sits over the subtropical Atlantic and acts like a guardrail, deflecting storms away from the mainland.

But on September 18th, 1938, something unusual happened. A powerful extratropical cyclone—essentially a large cold-weather storm system—developed just west of Chicago and began pushing a wall of cold Canadian air southward. This created a sharp cold front over the eastern United States, and that front fundamentally altered the hurricane's path.

Instead of curving out to sea, the hurricane found itself squeezed between two high-pressure systems: the Bermuda High to the east and another high-pressure area over the Midwest. The cold front acted like a highway, channeling all that warm, moist tropical air—and the hurricane riding within it—straight north toward New England.

Charles Pierce saw this. His senior colleagues did not.

The Forecaster Nobody Believed

Pierce was filling in for two vacationing veteran meteorologists that September day. He was young, inexperienced in the eyes of his superiors, and making a prediction that contradicted decades of conventional wisdom. Hurricanes simply didn't hit New England. The last major one had struck in 1869, and institutional memory is short.

At a noon meeting on September 21st, Pierce laid out his case. The storm would be funneled up the coast by the unusual atmospheric setup. It would strike Long Island and Connecticut that very afternoon.

Charles Mitchell, the celebrated chief forecaster, disagreed. So did the rest of the senior staff. The official position remained that the hurricane would curve out to sea as hurricanes always did.

Meanwhile, in Boston, a radio meteorologist named E.B. Rideout was telling his listeners on station WEEI exactly what Pierce had concluded: the hurricane was coming straight for New England. His peers thought he was being dramatic.

At 10:00 that morning, the Weather Bureau actually downgraded the hurricane to a tropical storm. Their 11:30 advisory mentioned "gale-force winds" but said nothing about a hurricane. Even their 2:00 p.m. update, issued as hurricane-force gusts were already battering Long Island's south shore, underestimated the storm's position and strength.

The hurricane was moving at forty-seven miles per hour—about the speed of a car on a country highway. There was simply no time left to warn anyone.

Landfall

At 3:45 in the afternoon, the hurricane slammed into Long Island near Bellport, New York, with sustained winds of one hundred twenty miles per hour. It was still a Category 3 storm, and its extraordinary forward speed added to the devastation. On the east side of the storm, where the hurricane's own winds and its forward motion combined, effective wind speeds may have exceeded one hundred fifty miles per hour.

The storm surge—that deadly wall of water pushed ahead of a hurricane—was catastrophic. In parts of eastern Long Island, the water rose twenty feet above normal. Dune Road in Westhampton Beach simply ceased to exist. Twenty-nine people died in that one small area alone.

At Montauk, the easternmost point of Long Island, the surge was so severe that it flooded completely across the South Fork at Napeague, temporarily turning Montauk into an island. The tracks of the Long Island Rail Road were obliterated.

The hurricane crossed Long Island Sound in minutes and made its second landfall near New Haven, Connecticut, still packing winds of one hundred fifteen miles per hour. It was one of only three tropical cyclones to strike Connecticut as a major hurricane in the entire twentieth century.

The Destruction Was Biblical

The numbers are almost incomprehensible. Nearly seven hundred people died—some estimates run as high as eight hundred. Another seven hundred were injured. Property damage reached three hundred six million dollars, which translates to nearly five billion dollars in today's currency. Some contemporary estimates placed the real damage even higher, approaching four hundred ten million dollars.

The storm destroyed forty-five hundred homes outright. It damaged another twenty-five thousand. It wrecked twenty-six thousand automobiles. It toppled twenty thousand electrical poles.

And then there were the trees.

Two billion of them.

The hurricane knocked down an estimated two billion trees across New York and New England. Over thirty-five percent of New England's total forest cover was affected. The destruction was so complete that the federal government created a new agency—the Northeastern Timber Salvage Administration—specifically to deal with the fire hazard posed by all that fallen wood. In the end, salvage crews recovered 1.6 billion board feet of lumber, but the scars on the landscape remained visible for decades. Some of the roads cut to remove fallen timber eventually became permanent trails that hikers still use today.

Both Yale and Harvard maintained large research forests managed by their forestry departments. The hurricane destroyed them both. Yale survived only because it happened to own a backup forest at Great Mountain in northwestern Connecticut, which escaped the worst damage. Harvard's forestry program never fully recovered.

New York City's Near Miss

Manhattan got lucky. The storm's most powerful winds were on its eastern side, and the city was struck by the weaker western half of the system. Still, gusts reached ninety miles per hour above the Daily News Building, and winds at the top of the Empire State Building were estimated at one hundred twenty miles per hour.

The storm surge at the Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan, reached eight and a half feet. In New York Harbor, the water rose seven feet in just thirty minutes. The East River overflowed and flooded a Consolidated Edison power plant at 133rd Street, plunging Manhattan north of 59th Street into darkness for hours.

Schools dismissed early. The Staten Island Ferry Knickerbocker became stuck in its terminal with two hundred passengers trapped aboard. Bridges and tunnels into Manhattan closed and didn't reopen until the following afternoon. Ninety-five percent of Nassau County lost power.

Adding to the chaos, a citywide trucker strike was underway across both New York City and New Jersey when the hurricane struck. The unions made exceptions for emergency relief supplies—allowing trucks to move food to relief depots, transport ballots for the New York primary election, and man the thousand sanitation trucks that Mayor Fiorello La Guardia deployed—but the strike complicated recovery efforts.

In Manhasset Bay on Long Island's north shore, nearly four hundred boats were torn from their moorings, smashed, or sunk. More than a hundred washed up on the beach by the Port Washington Yacht Club. The J.P. Morgan estate in Glen Cove suffered heavy damage. The mayor's own wife was forced to wait out the storm on the second floor of their cottage in Northport.

Rhode Island's Apocalypse

If Long Island was hit hard, Rhode Island was devastated. The state's entire coastline faced directly into the storm surge, and downtown Providence flooded under more than thirteen feet of water. The damage there was so complete that it took years to rebuild.

The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad's Shore Line between New Haven and Providence was particularly hard hit. Bridges were destroyed or flooded along its entire length, severing rail connections to towns like Westerly, Rhode Island, that desperately needed help.

No Warning at All

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of the 1938 hurricane was how completely it surprised its victims. There were no weather satellites in 1938, no hurricane hunter aircraft, no computer models. The Weather Bureau relied on ship reports, coastal observations, and educated guesswork.

The residents of Long Island had no idea a hurricane was coming. There was no time to prepare, no time to evacuate, no time even to move to higher ground. The storm arrived on a Wednesday afternoon when children were in school and adults were at work. Many people first realized something was wrong only when the water began rising around them.

This stands in stark contrast to modern hurricane forecasting, where storms are typically tracked from birth and landfall predictions are issued days in advance. When Hurricane Sandy struck roughly the same area in 2012, authorities had nearly a week to prepare. In 1938, they had nothing.

What If It Happened Today?

Meteorologists have studied the 1938 hurricane extensively, in part because the question haunts them: what would happen if an identical storm struck the same area today?

One study estimated that a repeat of the 1938 hurricane, adjusted for changes in population and infrastructure, would cause thirty-nine billion dollars in damage if it struck in 2005. That figure would be even higher today, given continued development along the vulnerable coastlines of Long Island, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

The storm's unusual track—driven straight north by that rare atmospheric setup—is exactly the kind of scenario that keeps emergency managers awake at night. Modern forecasting would provide far more warning time, but the fundamental vulnerability remains. Millions of people now live in areas that were sparsely populated in 1938. The infrastructure is more extensive but not necessarily more resilient.

The Storm That Shaped a Region

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 was a turning point in American meteorology. The forecasting failure embarrassed the Weather Bureau and led to significant reforms in how the agency tracked and predicted tropical cyclones. The disaster also prompted new investments in coastal protection and emergency preparedness throughout the Northeast.

But the storm's most lasting legacy may be in the landscape itself. Those two billion fallen trees transformed the forests of New England. The salvage roads became hiking trails. The cleared areas grew back differently than before. And in quiet corners of Connecticut and Rhode Island, you can still find the stone foundations of cottages that were swept away on that September afternoon when the weather bureau got it wrong and a young forecaster named Charles Pierce was right.

The 1938 hurricane is sometimes compared to the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, which may have been even more powerful at landfall. But we have only fragmentary records of that storm—diary entries and colonial correspondence. The 1938 storm arrived in an era of newspapers, radio, and film cameras, and its devastation was documented in excruciating detail.

Evidence of the destruction remained visible in affected areas as late as 1951. The memory lasted longer still. For a generation of New Englanders, "the hurricane" needed no date attached. Everyone knew which one you meant.