1938 New England Hurricane - Background

Background

Before the 1938 New England hurricane, it had been several decades since a hurricane of any significance adversely affected the northeastern Atlantic coastline. Nevertheless, history has shown that several severe hurricanes have affected the Northeast, although with much less frequency in comparison to areas of the Gulf, Florida, and southeastern Atlantic coastlines.

• The Great September Gale of 1815 (the term hurricane was not yet common in the American vernacular), which hit New York City directly as a Category 3 hurricane, caused extensive damage and created an inlet that separated the Long Island resort towns of the Rockaways and Long Beach into two separate barrier islands.

• The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane, a Category 4 storm which made four separate landfalls in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and southern New England. The storm created the highest recorded storm surge in Manhattan of nearly 13 feet and severely impacted the farming regions of Long Island and southern New England.

• The 1869 Saxby Gale affected areas in Northern New England, decimating the Maine coastline and the Canadian Outer Banks. It was the last major hurricane to affect New England until the 1938 storm.

• The 1893 New York hurricane, a Category 2 storm, directly hit the city itself, causing a great storm surge that pummeled the coastline, completely removing the Long Island resort town of Hog Island.

The years spanning 1893 to 1938 saw much demographic change in the Northeast as large influxes of European immigrants settled in cities and towns throughout New York and New England, many of whom knew little, if anything, about hurricanes. Most people at the time associated hurricanes with the warmer tropical regions off the Gulf Coast and southern North Atlantic waters off the Florida coastline, and not the colder Atlantic waters off New York and New England. The only tropical storms to affect the area in recent years had been weak remnant storms. A more common weather phenomenon was a noreaster, which is a powerful low-pressure storm common in the Northeast during fall and winter. Although Noreasters can produce winds that are similar to those in hurricanes, they generally do not produce the storm surge that proved to be the 1938 storm's greatest killer. By 1938, most of the earlier storms were hardly remembered.