Sudden Sea

The massive destruction wreaked by the Hurricane of 1938 dwarfed that of the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and the Mississippi floods of 1927, making the storm the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Now, R.A. Scotti tells the story.

Hurricane was a foreign word in New England then. People didn't know how to pronounce it. They didn't know what it meant, and whatever it meant, they were sure it couldn't happen to them. But on that Wednesday, September 21, 1938, a maverick storm was sprinting a mile a minute up the Atlantic seaboard like a giant Cyclops, its intense, sky blue eye fixed on new England. At two o'clock a swath of coastline from Cape May to Maine was one of the wealthiest and most populous in the world. By evening, it was desolate. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was more than a storm. It was the end of a world. - Jacket.