The Long Island Express
Info on historic hurricane that struck New England in 1938 and current NASA research
As my genetic insomnia so often dictates, I woke up after <2 hours sleep and started channel surfing. This led me to the History Channel about 12:25 a.m. for the last 35 minutes of their second nightly broadcast of "Nature's Fury: New England's Killer Hurricane," a 2006 documentary about a devastating hurricane in 1938. I'd not heard about this storm previously, so I spent the next 5 hours or so online trying to find out more. Did, including that our local library has NO books about it, even though several have been written! Anyway, because there are several New Englanders and, particularly, New Yorkers on this forum, I thought y'all might like to check into this storm because with the current weather system we're in (I forget, El Nino or La Nina?), a similar storm could happen within the next few years, including this one. Because of the population increase in these areas, the results would be more devastating than in 1938. Below is a summary of all I've read the last few hours (and hopefully regurgitated correctly!) from many sites, some of which offered conflicting information.
This storm began as a wind shift over the Sahara Desert on 4 Sept 1938, which passed over the West African coast and became a tropical storm near the Cape Verde Islands about 10 September. It picked up speed and moved west into the Atlantic, reaching hurricane status (74 mph) by 16 September and at some point reaching category 5 status. It seemed headed for Florida and they braced, but the storm passed and headed north toward Cape Hatteras, NC, which it also bypassed. All but one person at the Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau (a junior member named Charles Pierce), discounted history and other weather patterns and assumed the storm would continue to head northeast and die out. They were wrong. Pierce alone looked at all contributing factors and correctly predicted the storm would head north. As said, he was over-ruled and the New England coast got only gale warnings, which were not unusual and somewhat ignored.
The storm was noted off the coast of Cape Hatteras about 9 a.m., 21 Sept 1938. A high on one side of the storm kept it on its northward path; a low on the other side fueled it, allowing it to travel at between 50 and 70 mph over land, a somewhat unusual but not unknown occurrence. By 1 p.m. it was east of Atlantic City, NJ, where it ripped up part of the Boardwalk. By 2:30 p.m., the now-category 3 storm with an eye estimated to be 50 miles wide made landfall along the south shore of Long Island, NY.
Storms weren't named in those days but because of where this one initially struck it's been dubbed (among other things) the Long Island Express. By 3:30 p.m., the Rhode Island coast, particularly Providence, was getting the worst of the storm because they were on it's eastern (dirty) side. The storm wreaked havoc on New York and New England coastal areas, which had had lots of rain in the two weeks preceding it, so the ground was already saturated. In addition, the storm struck these areas at high tide at the fall equinox. Storm surge was massive and destructive. As it traveled, the hurricane lost force, downgrading to category 1 level by the time it reached Maine. By about 9 p.m., it had reached Montreal, Canada, and the cold air finished it off.
From the time it hit Long Island, the storm's winds were any where between 50 and 100 mph with gusts ranging up to 186 mph at one point (as registered in Boston, MA). Up to 700 people were killed (mostly owing to storm surge), around 2000 more injured. Thousands of homes, businesses, boats, etc., were destroyed or damaged. Power and telephone lines and poles were downed, railroad tracks destroyed, and thousands of trees lost. The storm effected at least eight States: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, and Maine. At least one good thing came out of this destruction: all the clean up and rebuilding provided much needed jobs to those effected by it and by the Great Depression.
A Google search brought up several sites concerning the storm. Unusually, I thought, the Wikipedia entry was not only unhelpful but questionable, so I'm not including a link for it. The links below are for sites I thought provided good information in general and/or for particular areas affected by the storm. The best, and one recommended on other sites is the first and was put up by Mandia A. Scott, professor of Physical Sciences, at State University of New York (SUNY) at Suffolk. New Yorkers might want to pay attention to Section VII, just in case.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/index.html
Part of PBS' American Experience series, the following PBS site provided a really good summary (some of which I've recapped) of the life of the storm:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/hurricane38/maps/index.html
Wayne Cotterly’s 2002 site provides additional information on the storm and its travels:
http://www.pivot.net/~cotterly/1938.htm
View from Providence includes pictures:
http://www.southstation.org/hurr1.htm
As an aside to the above, but in line with previous discussion on this thread, I found an article on USA Today Online that apparently was put up on Sunday and updated Monday. Some of you may already have seen it. It talks about a NASA-backed study being conducted in Africa, dubbed the NAMMA: NASA African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses. They're trying to figure out how and why 95% of storms die and 5% become hurricanes:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/research/2006-08-28-africa-storm-radar_x.htm
Okay, that's it. I'm not editing anymore. Please forgive any remaining mistakes.
Why not just mine a comet for the ice? 
