Customer Reviews

Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

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4 star:		(15)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

As an avid fan of all things weather-related, this book does not dissapoint. Much like Sebastian Unger's Perfect Storm, Sudden Sea focusses on an entire region that is caught off-guard by what in all estimates is still today one of the most devestatingly powerful storms the United States has seen. Scotti a does a wonderful job of intertwining story-lines stretching up and down the Eastern seaboard,further illustrating just how ill-prepared the population was for this freak storm.
Imagine not one by one, the middle-atlantic and new england coastlines being so devestated that cities were unable of warning the next. This is what happened in the summer of 1938. A storm that moved so fast and with such destruction that it literally reshaped the Eastern Coastline.
Buy this book. If you ever want to catch a glimpse into the humanity that becomes us in the face of disaster, this is a wonderful read. Read it before it becomes a movie -- which in all estimates it soon should be.

Wham! It hit me right between the eyes. I couldn't stop reading until I learned what happened to the kids on that bus. R.A. Scotti's detailed and moving account of physical destruction and human drama is a must-read for any storm watcher.

Initially projected to strike the Miami-Palm Beach area, the Category 5 Hurricane veered off course and went nearly unnoticed by the U.S. Weather Bureau's Washington D.C. office. If, according to Scotti's well-documented account, the higher-ups at the U.S. Weather Bureau's Washington D.C. office had listened to one junior forecaster, residents of Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island might have been able to brace themselves against the raging sea. Instead, the 2:00 p.m. weather advisory from Washington made no reference to the term "hurricane." A mere half-hour later, residents of Patchogue were blindsided when the Great Hurricane of 1938 slammed into eastern Long Island.

Scotti brings to this tale a human element so often missing in other books of this genre. This is, in many ways, a tale of human survival. Much of the book is drawn from personal interviews with survivors and, in that respect, "Sudden Sea" is, in part, a recording of oral history. Scotti's background as a novelist is evident throughout - I could clearly imagine Harriet and Margaret Moore clinging to shards of their rooftop as they floated through shark-infested waters from Napatree, Rhode Island towards Stonington, Connecticut, the children gathered for an end-of-summer party in Westhampton and the school bus mired the the murky waters near Mackerel Cove. In laying out the human drama, Scotti also discusses the conditions that allow such a storm to gain such force, investigates the failure of the U.S. Weather Bureau to issue appropriate weather advisories and questions whether such a storm could have such an impact today. I definitely recommend it!

I picked this book up on a whim and once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. Not having been alive in 1938 I knew very little about this disaster before reading Ms.Scotti's well reserched book. The way she weaves personal stories so seamlessly with the factual information creates a riviting tale of a way of life that would never fuloly be seen again. Ms.Scotti talks about the death and destrction that ravaged the east coast (682 deaths, 432 in Rhode Island alone) but she also talks about the amazing, and in some instaces humorus ways that people surrived the storm.
One of the things that I really love about the book is that it is so full of information and stories, yet I never felt confused or lost, I can't say that for many of the books I have read these days. I think Ms.Scotti is one of the most gifted writers I have had the pleasure of reading. Her ability to tug at your heart strings and not have it be in least bit over done is very refreshing. Personaly I think she is a breath of air as welcome as the sea breeze that must have been blowing along the beach only hours before the storm touched down. I can not wait to read her next book.

Not unlike the best seller A PERFECT STORM, this description of a runaway hurricane is different because of the time - 1938. Without radar, weather balloons or satellite pictures, the fledgling U. S. Weather Bureau was caught almost totally unaware when the 180 miles per hour winds, rain and sea surge skipped Florida, teased the Carolina coasts, ruffled the edges of New York and then slammed into southern New England. My personal experience is hearing my parents talk about it years later (I was only one) "And the pear tree went right over!"
SUDDEN SEA abounds with personal interviews, eye witness accounts, mountains of research in newspapers, magazines and archival records. Author R. A. Scotti conveys a good sense of the Great Depression, pre-technology 1938 world, draws on the emotional experiences of individuals, and keeps a suspense going at the same time. Although you have to wait to the last few pages to find out what happens to the kids on the school bus, in the meantime you learn about meteorology, the hurricane process, and what Katherine Hepburn was doing at the time (would you believe golf?).
Nicely narrated. I'm sending it to my mother.

I admit it. I am a severe weather junkie. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, tidal waves, earthquakes-any drama wrought by nature appeals to me. In fact, I found this book by accident when looking for a book on the 1888 blizzard.

Many people who write nonfiction stories such as this rely on their experience as a journalist (i.e.; Sebastian Junger who wrote The Perfect Storm). Instead, Scotti, a fiction author of thrillers, sets the book up like a novel. Yes, there are a lot of meteorological details but it's the human drama that she succeeds with best. Using newspaper accounts and interviews with survivors, Scotti describes the "heartbreak, heroism, the incredible luck and the tragic misfortune of individuals and families."One of the reasons it took me so long to read this book was that I was continually looking up pictures and info on the internet and looking at maps. This storm wreaked havoc on all of New England, but was particularly devastating to Rhode Island, wiping one little community completely off the map. Scotti takes these personal stories and weaves them together in a gripping way that keeps the reader turning the page at a feverish pace by the end trying to find out the fate of the families she writes about.

Powerful hurricanes are infrequent visitors to New England, but `The Long Island Express' not only paid a visit---it dropped in unannounced on September 21, 1938 just as many summer residents were on the beach and closing up their ocean-front cottages, among them actress Katharine Hepburn and her mother.

The Weather Bureau gave no cause for alarm, at least not after the hurricane skirted Florida and headed north. The meteorologists in Washington D.C. assumed that the storm would dissipate in the cold waters of the Atlantic, as had happened to all north-bound hurricanes since the Great September Gale devastated New England in 1815.

According to the author, no one could have been prepared for the 1938 storm's speed and ferocity. Sweeping northward from Cape Hatteras, building tremendous momentum as it advanced, the hurricane raced over six hundred miles in only twelve hours. Only the captain of the 'Carinthia,' a small 20,000 ton luxury cruiser that weathered the ferocious brawl 150 miles north of Florida might have given warning. He did radio to shore that his barometer had dropped "almost an inch to 27.85 in less than an hour. It was one of the lowest readings ever recorded in the North Atlantic."

Author Scotti interviewed many survivors of this ferocious storm, and includes the story of Katharine Hepburn who had to escape her seaside house through a dining room window and then battle her way to higher ground:

"When the Hepburns reached high ground, they looked back. [Their house] which had endured tide and wind since the 1870's, pirouetted slowly and sailed away."

Many folks were not as fortunate as the Hepburns. The storm surge was so sudden and so high many houses were completely inundated before their inhabitants could escape. One survivor saw a submerged house leap twenty-five feet into the air and explode. Another watched as a school bus containing his children was overtaken by the onrushing water. Others climbed to the top floors of their homes, then clung desperately to pieces of their roof as their houses washed away beneath them.

It is estimated that 682 people died and another 1,754 were seriously wounded by the 'Long Island Express.' Scotti focuses on a few representative stories, and relates tantalizing fragments of many others.

If you would like to read a first-hand account of the 'Long Island Express,' September 21, 1938 was also the day that Everett S. Allen, recent college graduate and future author of "A Wind to Shake the World," began his first `real' job as a reporter for the New Bedford `Standard Times.' His book is one of the finest accounts of this vastly underreported hurricane.

This is nice read, an almost pleasant (but, strangely, not gripping) saga of the great New England Hurricane of September 21,1938. Much of the focus of the storm and the story is on the wealthy Hampton areas of Long Island and the Newport area of Rhode Island. Scotti sets the time and place well: the end of the Depression (with the damage still evident), the brewing war in Europe, and the start of the university school year. This storm came not only at an unusual time but also at unusual places. Much of the damage to homes is the result of wealthy people taking advantage of splendid if dangerous views of the ocean. Some of the dead are domestics left behind to shutter summer homes.

"Sea" offers a clear companion and comparison to "Isaac's Storm," the epic of the Galveston hurricane of 1900. "Sea" is able to focus much more on the human element of the catastrophe, using interviews with survivors, photographs (fourteen glossy pages), and records that were just not kept in or saved from 1900. Survivors are alive today. "Sea" is more about the people who fought, including some who survived, the storm. In "Sea," a smug senior forecaster in Washington, DC dismisses the hurricane forecast of an assistant, striking the word `hurricane' from the assistant's report for September 21 and leading to a lack of warning to the targeted, highly populated areas. The fact that such a storm was unique or that most of the Atlantic's similar storms pushed to the northeast and out to sea was not a good reason to ignore the disastrous consequences of the "Bermuda high" that kept the storm closer to land. The post-storm analysis may have been the real impetus for the modernization of weather forecasting. repairing the damage to railroads, telephone lines, livestock and roads helped usher in the modern age. Air passenger traffice between New York and Boston increased 500% in the week after the storm.

Scotti, a journalist and mystery novelist, uses words well. "Sea" is laden with brief, connected, poignant stories. Capturing the wildness of the sea and storms is no small task. Scotti even includes a brief set of scenes from the life of Katherine Hepburn from that day: swimming and golfing in Connecticut, before seeing her estate, Tara, being washed away. "Sea: has about five small maps; each could have used a bit more detail. And a larger map, tracking the entire storm of its short life, would have been a good, consistent visual reference point for the reader, and would provide more of the dynamic nature of the storm. Without it, some of the stories are static and difficult to connect.

When you think of hurricanes you tend to think of the Caribbean or the Coastal South, not New England but in 1938 a killer hurricane of massive proportions hit an unprepared New England and changed both the geography and people of that region forever. The first question that comes to mind of course concerns what a hurricane was doing that far north in the first place. New England is certainly not immune from storms but most hurricanes strike the South, swerve back out to sea or weaken greatly before they get that far north. This one not only made it to New England but it retained its power and probably slammed parts of the coast with 200 mph winds. Without answering this question the author certainly could not tell this story in a credible way so this is one of the first things that she sets out to do and she does it very well indeed. Not only does she explain the several weather oddities that had to come together for this disaster to happen, she does so in a manner that anyone who has even the most passing acquaintance with weather terminology can understand. She also handles the story of how the weather bureau lost the storm and therefore provided no warnings to the people who were about to face the full fury of nature with a deftness that allows the reader to understand what happened and why.

Once the reader is sufficiently girded with the basic knowledge needed to grasp the situation at hand the author proceeds to weave in the story of the people who were in the great storm's crosshairs. She does this in such a masterful way that if you weren't aware that you were reading history you would be convinced that you were in the midst of a great novel. As the storm approaches we meet family after family who are just going about their daily routine with no knowledge of what's to come. We meet young sweethearts walking on the beach and families having little parties for their children. We meet the rich and famous residents of the area and recent immigrants who can't even speak English. These people have little in common except for being in close geographic proximity to one another but they are all about to have much in common for Mother Nature is no respecter of wealth or power and has no pity on the poor.

Once the storm hits Scotti paints a brilliant picture of the disaster in progress. Her words are so beautifully descriptive that the reader will almost be able to hear the wind and feel the surging sea. The eyewitness accounts that she relies on describe in vivid detail the destruction of buildings and the struggles of those caught in the storm's fury. Best of all, she conveys the emotion of the moment as she describes tragedy after tragedy and conveys a feeling for the victims that historical writers seldom achieve. Through Scotti's words the reader will almost be moved to tears as a father watches helplessly as his children are swept away and will also feel the fear that gripped those who were just holding on for dear life.

As is always the case, this storm passes but with its passing it leaves in its wake a scene of destruction and death seldom seen in America. Again Scotti rises to the challenge of describing the aftermath of the storm, both in the short term and in the long term and she explains how many of those long-term effects are still being felt today. Unfortunately, many New Englanders have forgotten about this storm even though its effects have probably touched their lives. Maybe this book, this excellent book, will remind the people of Coastal New England of just what can happen when all of the pieces of the weather puzzle fall snugly into place.

As someone raised in the northeastern USA, who had heard stories of the great hurricane of 1938 from my parents, I anticipated a good read. Was I disappointed!
There are errors, either in research or editing, in the beginning of "Sudden Sea" which raise questions in my mind about the information presented in the rest of the book.
For example, in the Prologue (pages 3-5), she refers to a July 14, 1938, flight made by Howard Hughes (to provide a link to Katherine Hepburn, Hughes' then girl-friend whose family home was later destroyed in the 1938 hurricane). The author states that, as Hughes' plane took off from Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island, it was carrying 1,500 tons of flammable fuel, and "any glitch and it could explode as the "Hindemburg" did the month before in New Jersey." (p. 4). The airship Hindenburg actually exploded at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, fourteen months before Hughes' flight. The author, listed in the liner notes as a former reporter for the "Newark Star-Ledger", should know better--or have had a better fact-checker.
On pages 43 and 49, the author refers to the hurricane as it was poised to strike Florida, in the terms of the Saffir-Simpson Damage Potentiasl Scale. On p. 49 she writes that "by eight o-clock Tuesday night it was still curving north-northeast.
Winds had diminshed to 138 miles an hour from a morning high of 155. The Category 5 storm was downgraded to a Category 3." The Saffir-Simpson Scale was not conceived until 1972 and introduced to the public in 1975 (Williams and Duedall, "Florida Hurricanes and Tropical Storms, p. 4) Nowhere in the 1938 written descriptions of the storm could the Saffir-Simpson Scale have been used. More sloppy research and interpretation by the author.
On p. 51, the author describes the "SS Conte di Savoia", an Italian luxury liner which had a brush with the hurricane, as "814 feet long and just under forty-nine tons." The weight should be 49,000 tons. Didn't the author have an editor?
I'm neither a trained meteorologist nor a historian. I am interested in the weather but am certainly no expert. These obvious errors make me question the author's research for the rest of the book. I found the book, with its decriptions of how many people were affected by the hurricane, interesting--but, as I said, how accurate is the author's research?

I started reading this book on Saturday and was finished on Monday morning. It completely held my interest. I enjoyed the human element and couldn't wait to find out what happened to the many people in this devasting hurricane. Each account was breath-taking. It makes me want to know more...I am recommending this book to everyone I come in contact with. That anyone lived through this storm was amazing. It makes you realize what is really important in life. I enjoyed the author's telling of this story.