DISASTERS: The Great Whirlwind

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The weathermen first spotted the hurricane when it towered up off the West Indies, at about lat. 16° N., long. 60° W. It was a monstrous specimen—a spinning funnel of black storm with a 140-mile-an-hour gale lining its core of calm. For six days, moving as a body about 15 m.p.h., it churned a path 500 miles wide up & across the Atlantic. And for six days U.S. meteorologists clocked its forward progress, studied its habits, and charted its course (see SCIENCE). When it hit North Carolina's ocean bulge on the seventh day and started up the Eastern Seaboard, ripping like a circular saw, they foretold its movements almost to the mile and hour.

The great hurricane of 1938 had burst upon the coast almost without warning, killed 500 people, and left a half-billion dollar litter of wreckage behind. But the meteorologists of 1944 had sharpened their science in war, and the radio and the press had forewarned people in the hurricane's path.

Prologue. Before it hit the U.S. coast, the hurricane threatened the Bahamas and Florida, hesitated, and veered off north and east. Then, finally, it whirled in across the dunes of Cape Hatteras at 4:30 one morning, piling a tremendous surf upon the coast and filling the dawn with wind and rain. After that, hour after hour, radio stations from Delaware to Maine cried the alarm, like pygmies running ahead of a mad elephant.

The people listened to the loudspeakers. Families were evacuated from coastal areas where people had been trapped in 1938. Officials, mayors, governors broadcast directions to police, citizens and civilian-defense organizations. Airlines grounded planes, schools closed, businesses let workers off early. Railroads and power & light companies gathered maintenance crews. Millions of housewives dug out candles. Farmers drove in their stock.

Then the millions waited.

Curtain Up. The hurricane sawed its way up the eastern shore of Maryland, the coasts of Delaware and New Jersey with ponderous leisure, its center still offshore. Mile by mile, rain fell, the skies darkened; the wind stirred, then blew, then howled, and the downpour multiplied. Mile by mile along the coasts the great pressure of air pushed the tide into towns, sent great seas tumbling and smashing upon the land. Then the lights went out and telephone lines went down; the chattering radios were stilled, and the candles were lit. At Atlantic City the wind ripped up the famed boardwalk, smashed through the famed Steel Pier.

Manhattan's piles of steel and stone, its solid brownstone houses stood firm, but the city's intricate, antlike pattern of existence failed. The hurricane moaned between skyscrapers in 95-mile-an-hour gusts. Water crept into the subways and trains stalled; thousands of people stayed in downtown buildings, watching the storm crash through the stone canyons. Up & down Long Island and through Westchester County huge old trees were uprooted bodily, usually falling south.*

Finale. The hurricane crossed Long Island and roared on across New England. Then, state by state, the wind died, the rain stopped and the stars came out.