SUDDEN SEA
--------
John Pazmino
NYSkies Astronomy Inc
www.nyskies.org
nyskies@nyskies.org
2006 February 1
[This article was writtten before the NYSkies ewbsite was established.
It is edited to remove typos. Otherwise it is the original text]
Introduction
----------
In the past many months the Science, Industry, Business Library,,
Manhattan, presented several talks about natural disasters. These
were potential ones like the Vesuvius volcano, and actual ones, like the
Indian Ocean tsunami. On 31 January 2006 Ms Scotti presented 'Sudden
Sea' about the hurricane of 1938. She had her book, of the same title,
on hand for sale and signing.
This hurricane was among the worst natural disasters in American
history. It exploited speed and surprise as it walloped Long Island
and New England on 1938 September 21. Many in the audience either were
in the hurricane directly or knew people who were. These added many
fascinating tales to that elaborated by Ms Scotti.
Hurricane tracking
----------------
In the prewar years hurricanes were treated as a peculiarly
southern US concern, with the vulnerable zone reaching from New
Orleans to the North Carolina coast. Very few hurricanes made it
farther north to New York or Long Island. If they did they were by
then weakened to no worse than ordinary winter storms.
There was only one station monitoring hurricanes, in Jacksonville,
Florida, crewed by only two men from the Weather Bureau. They relied
on radio reports from ships in the middle and equatorial regions of
the Atlantic Ocean and hand plotted the hurricanes on paper maps.
For hurricanes remote from land, ships were the only eyes and ears
for reporting them. Aviation still offered too little traffic to be
effective in monitoring the storms.
The entire emphasis was on protecting the Atlantic coast from the
Carolinas to Florida and the Gulf coast. There was simply no motive to
extend hurricane watches farther north.
There were in place evacuation and recovery programs for the
affected coastline, mostly under local or state jurisdiction. No
national or federal disaster assistance was established.
Hurricanes were not named then and went into the record books only
by the year. Small hurricanes causing only 'normal' damage were
generally treated as aggravated autumn storms.
Path of hurricane 1938
--------------------
Hurricane 1938 started in the Cape Verde Islands area of the
Atlantic Ocean, where most hurricanes are born. It was quickly
recognized as a major cyclone by September 16th and monitored. It
headed westward on a familiar path toward the southern United States
and Caribbean islands.
It grew in strength from the late summer heated air and water, All
activity was passive being that the theory and modeling of hurricanes
in the 1930s was pretty crude. Reports from sea vessels caused alarm
enough to send up hurricane warnings for southern Florida. relief and
rescue crews were moved into Dade and other south Florida counties.
Coastal towns, including Miami, were boarded up as was standard
procedure for an approaching hurricane.
The storm was a full-blown hurricane, what we today would class as
category 5, on September 19th when it was about to hit land on
September 19th. Suddenly, it stopped for an hour or so, then slapped
north. It never touched Florida except for some heavy rain of no great
harm.
It speeded north at about the fastest a hurricane was then and now
clocked, averaging 100 to 120 kilometer per hour. In context, this is
about the very fastest a car or train of 1938 can move! Due to the
shape of the US Atlantic coast, hurricane 1938 missed all land from
Florida to Delaware. It passed Cape Hatteras about 400 kilometers off
shore. Once it moved beyond the heavily-trafficked sealanes of Florida
there were only scattered reports of its progress until very near the
New Jersey-New York sealanes.
On September 20th winds picked up on the New Jersey and Long
Island coasts to put up small-craft warnings. Nothing was
mentioned,
or known, about a gigantic hurricane on the way. In the northern
states there was no established hurricane watch or emergency response
system. Storms previous to 1938 were localized, caused damage that
allowed quick recovery.
The landfall
----------
Hurricanes typicly use three weapons for their destruction: wind,
rain, wave. In addition, hurricane 1938 used speed -- 100KPH forward
motion -- and surprise -- there was no warning or preparation. The
bulk of damage was caused by the storm surge, walls of ocean water
that piled up before the wind to heights of several meters. The waves
hit Long Island in mid afternoon on the 21st of September.
This storm wave was superimposed on the normal high tide that
occurred at the same time. With Long Island being a sea level
territory, these waves penetrated far inland, clear across the island
to the glacial moraine.
People were caught in their foot steps with no defense. The human
toll was about 250 on Long Island, 400 in Rhode Island, and 50 in
other parts of New England. The majority of deaths were from
collapsing structures or drowning.
Property damage was widespread, given the light construction of
seashore buildings. Power, telephone, telegraph, roads, rails were
severed, preventing easily communication to other parts of the
country. The storm wave was so fast and sudden when it slammed onto
land that it jiggled seismometers around the world as a small
earthquake!
The hurricane struck in the middle of Long Island, missing New
York City. The western arms of the cyclone brushed the City with heavy
rain and high seas. Subways, underpasses, cellars, utility chambers,
sewers, were flooded. Toppled trees and light structural damage was
reported all over the City. Skyscrapers swayed a meter off plumb at
their tops. At first, the weather was called a stronger-than-usual
wind-rain storm, not a colossal hurricane. That was the result of
interrupted news from the Island and New England.
Path in New England
-----------------
After crossing Long Island and moving into upland of New England,
hurricane 1938 lost its power source of heated ocean. It, like any
other hurricane faded. It continued north into Vermont, Lake
Champlain, the Adirondacks, Quebec. There a little north of Montreal
it died out as a vigorous autumn rain-wind event.
That's why it is a gross worry if a hurricane after a landfall
moves back over the sea. It can regain strength and strike with
renewed vigor at another landfall.
Even today we can not with nay confidence predict the future path
of a hurricane until the final 24 hours at best. By then the die is
cast for the target areas and defenses better be ready by then. There
is always the risk of ringing th alarm for too wide an area, due to
the error fan of the hurricane's future path.
Preparing for a hurricane is very costly in dollars, human
resources, equipment, material. The agony of an emergency response
agency is to apply the resources judiciously, yet adequately, to cover
the reasonably expected target area.
Some geography
------------
If you study a US map, you'll notice that the Atlantic coast is
strongly aligned north-south with only gentle excursions east-west. A
hurricane track would parallel this coast on its usual coast-hugging
path. Look closely at New York. Long Island juts straight east-west,
as if to dare a hurricane to smack it head on. The island is some 150
kilometers long, presenting a large target for hurricanes on a north
heading. If it misses Long Island for being too far east, it has a
second large target, the Rhode Island, southeast Massachusetts coast.
This includes Hyannis, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket.
All these targets are low-lying zones with elevations of mere
meters above sea level. The only obstruction is the glacial moraine of
Long Island, which is a few tens of meters in elevation at most.
Hence, a hurricane can inflict its damage over a vast geographic
area, not only along the very sea coast.
Long Island as a whole is a protective barrier for Connecticut,
separated from there by Long Island Sound. Rhode Island and southeast
Massachusetts extend beyond the east end of Long Island and front the
sea, and Hurricane, with no barrier to protect them.
Rhode Island has an other strike against it. It is made of dozens
of islands in Narragansett Bay. A major storm that jives the Bay can
devastate the state.
The soil in all the targets is mostly alluvial left by the
glaciers in the last ice-age. The Library had a talk earlier in 2005
'The ice age stopped here' that discussed the shaping of the New York
region by glaciers. Such loose soil is easily shifted by moving water,
carrying structures built on it.
Geographic changes
----------------
Hurricane 1938 cut the neck that delimits the Hamptons from 'up-
island'. This is now the Shinnecock Canal. The breach was canalized as
a 'bonus' of the hurricane to facilitate boat traffic between the
ocean and Peconic Bay. It has locks to step boats between the
different tide levels on each end.
The storm also cut the Moriches, forming the inlet of today. This
as stabilized but not canalized, to pass boats between the ocean and
Great South Bay without having to sail tens of kilometers around Fire
Island.
Immense volumes of sand were shoved around on the barrier islands,
Montauk and Buzzard's Bay. In the one day of the tempest, the
landscape altered as much as it did before in several decades. By now,
almost 70 years later, the coastline by normal natural evolution
pretty much erased the marks of the hurricane.
Some physics
----------
Ms Scotti didn't quite explain why hurricane 1938 was so
devastating on eastern Long Island and eastern New England, and
comparatively mild on the western sides. First, recall that in the
northern hemisphere a cyclone rotates counterclockwise. As air falls
into the low pressure eye of the storm, it, by Coriolis effect,
spirals inward.
The very center of the hurricane, the eye, is devoid of storm by
centrifugal effect. It is a region a few dozen kilometers diameter of
calm still, even sunny, weather.
For a storm at rest on the ground, the wind speed on the west
flank is the same as that on the east. The wind directions are
opposite. The west side wind heads south; east, north.
As the hurricane procedes north, its ground speed is added to the
circular speed of its winds. On the east flank, the speeds are both
north, so they add to increase the wind speed seen by the ground.
Hurricane 1938 was racing at some 100KPH, so whatever was the circular
wind speed, the ground on the east side of the eye felt that plus an
additional 100KPH.
On the west side, near New York City, the hurricane speed is still
north but now it opposes the southward circular wind. Whatever it was,
it was felt by th ground as being 100KPH less. given that the City
suffered storm levels of wind anyway, it's anyone's guess what
happened on the east side. There are no reliable wind speed measures
from the affected areas.
For us in the City, if the eye passes to our east, over Long
Island, we get the lesser harm from wind. Should the eye pass us on
the west, over New Jersey, we are whumped with extra strength wind.
News movie
--------
A short movie was made of the hurricane in the style of a news
film with the crisp narration and dramatic scenes. Ms Scotti showed
it; it's on view at the Library. It presented the storm as the
greatest natural disaster in American history. Scotti keeps this honor
in her own book 'Sudden Sea', at sale after her talk. The Library
handed out a resource guide for the Hurricane that included many
books, newspaper articles, and the movie.
Recovery
------
In spite of the lack of dedicated services to recover from
hurricanes, the affected region sprang back remarkably quickly. 1938
was still feeling the Depression. There was in place civilian armies
under the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress
Administration. These were already busy in civic works, like finishing
the IND Sixth Avenue subway and the Hayden Planetarium. Being in a
paramilitary service, they were ordered to rebuild the damaged areas
after the hurricane.
Because the regions were on the sea coast, the normal coast and
harbor departments of towns and states were called up for rescue and
relief. It was, however, up to the individual jurisdictions.
Insurance, such as there was any, covered only a minor part of the
losses. There were many technical rejections of claims, plus
stonewalling by the insurance companies.
The days following hurricane 1938 were sunny autumn days, aiding
and comforting the recovery work. In time, about when World War II
started for the United States, most life returned to normal.
Hurricane study
-------------
It took World War II to kick the United States into thinking
seriously about hurricanes. With increased shipping in the Atlantic,
the need for military advantage thru weather, and newly expanded air
traffic, hurricane study became an integral part of the war effort.
Monitoring stations were set up at several places on the Atlantic and
Gulf coasts, some used also to monitor enemy submarines and ships.
Our present tracking of hurricanes evolved from the wartime
program. Eventually the range of territory vulnerable to hurricanes
was expanded to the full Atlantic coast, including the City.
Greatest natural disaster?
------------------------
This hurricane has been called the greatest natural disaster in
American history. So have many other storms, floods, earthquakes,
fires, volcanos. How are disasters ranked?
There is no uniform method for assessing the magnitude of a
disaster. While a one incident may cause more effect under one factor,
others may excede it for different factors. With no consistency in
documenting natural disasters and no way to combine the various losses
into a single figure-of-merit, it's largely a numbers game to claim
title as 'greatest natural disaster'.
However, as a local incident, hurricane 1938 is quite likely the
largest single natural calamity suffered by Long Island and southern
New England. There were earthquakes and other huge storms long before
the instant one, the population and development of this region was
orders lower than in 1938. Hence, the accountable damage was far less
for those earlier episodes.
A giant hurricane today
---------------------
If such a hurricane hit this area again, the property loss would
be orders greater, simply because of denser development now and the
higher price levels. The one and same house that survived the 1938
storm, costing then $10,000, today could fetch some $500,000. This
increase is due to the behavior of real estate market, not addition of
facilities or improvements. This immense increase far surpasses what
the general inflation would generate.
That house in 1938 stood alone with hundreds of meters of open
country around it. Today it's hemmed in by newer houses filling in
that land. The combination of dense building and rising prices could
equate a modest winter nor'easter's dollars of damage with that from
the entire life of that 1938 hurricane!
Human loss for a future storm of comparable strength and size as
hurricane 1938 would be orders less. With warning and preparations now
in place, people could remove to safer ground or to shelters well
before the landfall. Altho both Long Island and Rhode Island with
their confining geography are tricky to evacuate smoothly and rapidly,
there seems to be no need to actually displace whole counties. Moving
people from vulnerable structures to strong-rooms still within the
target zone and provisioning them for the duration is the safer and
saner strategy.
Comparison with Katrina
---------------------
With hurricane Katrina still fresh in the mind of the audience,
many questions related to that episode. Ms Scotti didn't study Katrina
for her book, which was published in 2003 and focused on hurricane
1938. She did note that a dominant factor in New Orleans was that the
town was built behind levees and pumps. The destruction came from
storm waves and swollen rivers overtopping the levees and swamping the
pumps.
Lack of orderly evacuation left many people in the vulnerable
parts of the town. After the hurricane passed, the water was trapped
in New Orleans. It could not drain off naturally like in other coastal
towns.
The standing water complicated rescue and recovery. like impeding
fire fighting. Being salt ocean water, it corroded utilities and
fixtures and killed agriculture. It quickly became a health hazard
from its unsanitary and putrid condition.
Comparison of New York City with the Gulf coast for disaster
preparation and relief is grossly unfair. Just from geography the two
regions are hardly equal before a hurricane. This alone, forgetting
about the social and institutional factors, means that a hurricane
plan for the City has to be built on its own peculiar considerations
and not be derived from a Gulf coast scheme.
My own comments
-------------
I, of course, did not live thru hurricane 1938. I know several
friends who did. I related one of their tales about salvaging an
uprooted house. She lived on Long Island with ample land to place a
second house. The hurricane tore off a bicycle shop in East Hampton
and shoved it around the streets. It somehow stayed intact, possibly
because it skidded bodily before the wind.
She arranged to save the store, which itself closed business, and
have the house moved to her property. There is stands today as her
'yellow' house, from the color of paint she applied to it.
An other friend lived on Fire Island thru a normal winter storm.
She built her house to be hurricane-proof as an A-fame with the
sloping side facing the sea. Wind and storm waves would ride up the
slope but not penetrate or crush the house.
Down the beach from her was some rich guy's house. It was a drum
with picture windows around the side. The thing rotated on a motorized
hub so the man could see the ocean no matter what room he was in.
One cold and stormy night, friend was in her house warming by her
fireplace and reading some cold and stormy night novel. Outside she
heard cracking gnashing noises from the storm. There was the round
house, lights flickering, rattling on its hub! Suddenly, it ripped off
of the hub, flipped on its side, and rolled into Great South Bay! The
house didn't take kindly to such ersatz forces. It crumpled into a
heap in the bay.
New York hadn't suffered a great hurricane in over a century. Ms
Scotti mentioned one in 1815. I hazard that weather records were so
incomplete and scratchy that the storm could be misinterpreted. In any
case, it seems to me that New York and vicinity actually takes as much
damage over timescale of a century as that from a monster hurricane.
We get the famous, infamous, winter nor'easter storms. This is a
lashing of rain and wind and waves, combined with freezing
temperatures. This mix smashes seawalls, floods low areas, topples
trees, heaves over light buildings, tosses cars, overturns boats, cuts
power lines, washes out roads and rails, interdicts aviation almost
yearly. Each instance causes minor damage that can be quickly repaired
with the next dry spell.
On the plus side, there is almost no loss of life in these annual
episodes. the worse is the occasional accidents like skidding in a car
off of a rain-slicked road. So the human cost of these routine events
is small, but the property loss can add up. If all this annual
property toll is summed, it could equal or excede the loss in the one
day in a century from a large hurricane.
Conclusion
--------
Time erases the living memory of the 1938 event. Only the oldest
folk today experienced it and most never went thru a similar incident
since then. The talk at this time, January 2006, invited comparisons
with hurricane Katrina from September 2005. If it were not for the
occurrence of Katrina, the audience may well have taken Scotti's
lecture as an interesting bit of remote history.
Ms Scotti closed with the same message that other disaster-theme
talks closed. It's not IF New York can be attacked by disaster, it's
WHEN it will be.