Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938 by R.A. Scotti recounts the devastating hurricane that hit New England in September 1938. To tell you the truth, I didn't know a thing about this hurricane, so I learned a lot.

The U.S. Weather Service had barely been formed at this time, and relied almost

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completely on firsthand sightings of storms. This hurricane began forming off the coast of Africa and moseyed across the Atlantic, gathering speed and force. The Weather Service employees in Florida put all the available data together, informed the public, and then watched as the
behemoth swerved and missed their state on its way north. The next existing weather bureau was in Washington, D.C. Only one person put all the information together correctly, but he was a new guy, so his conclusions were dismissed. This hurricane was going back out to sea where it would lose steam. No one needed to worry.

What the hurricane did was swing back out to sea and feed off the warm summer water--and that's when it turned into a monster of size, strength and speed. With no warning whatsoever, it hit the western edge of Long Island, causing plenty of damage there, but when it continued on and slammed into eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island--tragedy. Coastlines were completely remodeled. Entire towns were wiped off the face of the earth. An entire way of life was obliterated.

When looking through the photos included in this book, my whispered "Oh, my god!" was totally inadequate. From a beach lined with three-story Victorian beach homes to...pristine sand. New London, Connecticut almost burned to the ground. Dozens of mills were totally demolished and never rebuilt. The power of Mother Nature never ceases to awe me.

Scotti blended the firsthand accounts and all the facts skillfully. I didn't want to put the book down. One of the survivors most of us have heard of: Katharine Hepburn. As she fought her way through the rapidly rising water, she looked back to see her family home float away as if it were taking a leisurely stroll down the street.

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A horrifying read. Again, not good timing for me. I live thirty miles from Galveston and hurricane season has just begun. Very hard for me to read.I've heard all my life about the storm of 1900 that devastated Galveston, but I've never heard anything about this storm. It was the only category five

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hurricane to hit the mainland of the United States. The book is well written, with stories from the storm you'd never believe if they were sold as fiction. The photographs were powerful and shocking. Reading this book made me want to put my house up for sale.

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Just as good as "Issac's Storm" - a harrowing tale of devastation and survival. It is difficult to imagine such a massive storm approaching with so little warning. Thank goodness for our modern technology and forecasting skill - not perfect and probably never will be - but by comparison so

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excellent.

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It was the Perfect Storm. But instead of raging far out in the Atlantic, the Great Hurricane of 1938 left a wake of death and destruction across seven states. It battered J. P. Morgan's Long Island estate, wiped out beach communities from Watch Hill to Newport, flooded the Connecticut Valley, and

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flattened Vermont's prized maples.Traveling at record speeds, the storm raced up the Atlantic Coast, reaching New York and New England ahead of hurricane warnings and striking with such ferocity that seismographs in Alaska picked up the impact. Winds, clocked at 186 mph, stripped cars of their paint. Walls of water 50 feet high swept homes and entire families out to sea. Sandwiched between the Great Depression and World War II, the storm had a profound impact upon a generation. 'The day of the biggest wind has just passed,' the newswires read the next day, 'and a great part of the most picturesque America, as old as the Pilgrims, has gone beyond recall or replacement.' Drawing upon newspaper accounts, the personal testimony of survivors, forecasters, and archival footage, SUDDEN SEA recounts that terrifying day in gripping detail. Scotti describes the unlikely alignment of meteorological conditions that conspired to bring a tropical cyclone to the Northeast. A masterful storyteller, Scotti follows the trajectory of that awful wind-and recovers for posterity the lost stories of those whose lives, families, and communities were destroyed by the Hurricane of 1938.

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