Posted on 08/28/2011 4:49:42 PM PDT by Hojczyk
CULTURE BUZZ The most destructive hurricane to hit New England in the last two hundred years. Making landfall as a Category 3, the Long Island Express (hurricanes weren't named at the time) killed over 600 people and destroyed more than 57,000 homes
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/x-photos-from-the-devastating-new-england-hurrican
Dude, sailing ship ping. Water is good and bad.
What needless destruction. If only FDR had been wise enough to lower the levels of the seas and heal the planet.
thanks for satisfying out jones for hurricane devastation, which Irene was pretty much unable to do.
out jones >> our jones
ping
What Irene might have done. So glad it turned out otherwise this time.
Never mind that the Hurricane of 1944 was a Cat 1 at the time that passed off the coast of Jersey and caused major storm surge destruction. We're just supposed to KNOW that Irene wasn't a real threat for such - after the fact.
Morons.
I have read that if the same storm occurred now, taking the same path through Long Island, the loss of life would be astronomical.
wowzer.
Good one!
Did Gorebot blame that one on Carbon, too?
Just askin.
Those pictures are incredible.I had never heard of the hurricane of 38, even from my grandparents.
I also never knew that ‘these’ existed till this weekend. All of them were found on youtube. Peruse at your convenience.
1938 Hurricane
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA-3zULhCvM&feature=related
1938 Hurricane brushs past NJ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWZDMj4iBA&feature=related
The Great New England Hurricane of 1938
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b21g-5YBLs&NR=1
1938 Hurricane slams East Coast Public Domain Footage Newsreel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Rnlnm_AQQ&feature=related
Hurricane damage in Mastic and Moriches, Long Island, NY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDrIJqa6oCM&feature=related
long island express hurricane of 1938
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq2mplqTgTs&feature=related
Remembering the Hurricane of 1938
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FswrR_zxy3E&feature=related
Hurricanes Hit The East Coast - 1938 / 1936 / 1933
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4w24sRoJ7s&feature=related
The Great hurricane of 1938
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6BMjZpnAf8
Hurricane of 1938 - Part I through 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pc3YKxJFJU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6wdUUEzDLE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXP0uBJM51U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScKIq9lNwlk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV6qiHE3NyQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P9YX4WvKg8&feature=related
1938 Telephone History Hurricane Repair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KMRDYqRR8o&feature=related
The same can be said for Miami or other major cities on the Eastern seaboard. For all the devastation wrought by Andrew in 1992 the fact that the main path was well south of the city was a blessing in terms of loss to life and property.
New York City tends to get a major (Cat 3 or better) storm once a century or so. The problem with rare events is that memories fade and the true power of nature tends to pass into legend and be forgotten.
Hurricanes are hardly unique in this regard. Similar scenarios can be constructed regarding any number of real but rare natural events.
Dutch elm disease was present in the US at the time, and was a problem. There was no real way to manage it, but the situation had not yet gotten out of hand.
However, in the wake of the hurricane, many toppled elm trees were left in place (people had more important things to take care of). The dead wood helped the beetle population explode and Dutch Elm dsease spread very rapidly as a result. Within just a few decades, elm trees were almost entirely gone from the American landscape.
Ping for later
I am so sick of blowhards on here claiming “nothing happened” because NEW YAWK didn’t get washed into the ocean. It seems as if NEW YAWK is the center of the universe, and if nothing happens to NEW YAWK, than it’s a wash.
Ask the folks on the OBX about Irene. Places that haven’t flooded in more than 80 years were under 6 feet of water last night. Hatteras Island was cut in half.
http://www.wral.com/weather/video/10057638/#/vid10057638
In my view what happened was that the preparations were made on the possibility that Irene would hit the NYC area as a cat 3 or 4. This possibility became a presumption and then doctrine. The driving rationale was that the public had to be scared into taking the storm seriously. After landfall in NC, though, Irene started winding down, and the scenario that drove the more drastic preparations, in particular the mandatory evacuation of 300,000 in NYC, was obviously not going to happen. Well, no one knew exactly how bad it would actually be, and the need to support public policy became the overriding doctrine, so the facts of the storm’s decline were simply not reported even though they were easy to see.
In addition to this, we had Obama and FEMA making political hay out of the whole thing, and the result was a media conflagration of historic proportions.
So yeah, it was a bad storm with lots of damage, but the reaction to the “hype” is legitimate and nothing to do with hindsight.
Hard to garner much sympathy from me for folks who choose to invest money to build a house on a sandbar.
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