The hurricane that pummeled the northeastern United States on September 21, 1938, was New England’s most damaging weather event ever. To call it “New England’s Katrina” might be to understate its power. Without warning, the storm plowed into Long Island and New England, killing hundreds of people and destroying roads, bridges, dams, and buildings that stood in its path. Not yet spent, the hurricane then raced inland, maintaining high winds into Vermont and New Hampshire and uprooting millions of acres of forest. This book is the first to investigate how the hurricane of ’38 transformed New England, bringing about social and ecological changes that can still be observed these many decades later. The hurricane’s impact was erratic—some swaths of forest were destroyed while others nearby remained unscathed; some stricken forests retain their prehurricane character, others have been transformed. Stephen Long explores these contradictions, drawing on survivors’ vivid memories of the storm and its aftermath and on his own familiarity with New England’s forests, where he discovers clues to the storm’s legacies even now. Thirty-Eight is a gripping story of a singularly destructive hurricane. It also provides important and insightful information on how best to prepare for the inevitable next great storm.

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The New England landscape has long been battered by some of the most intense weather in the United States. The region breeds one of the highest concentrations of meteorologists in the country for a reason. One can experience just about anything except a dust storm. Snowstorms, floods, droughts, heat waves, arctic blasts, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and other atmospheric oddities come and go with the changing seasons. Rare is the boring year of weather. Knowing the past is a critical part of understanding and forecasting the weather. Meteorologist Eric Fisher takes an in depth look at some of the most intense weather events in New England’s history. The stories in this book not only describe the loss and the damage caused by the storms, but also how nearly all of them in left such an impression that they immediately led to progress where new warnings systems were implemented, government agencies formed, and technology accelerated in response to the devastation these events left behind.

"On September 21, 1938 the great New England hurricane hit the shores of New York and New England unannounced. The most powerful storm of the century, it changed everything, from the landscape and its inhabitants' lives, to Red Cross and Weather Bureau protocols, to the amount of Great Depression Relief New Englanders would receive, and the resulting pace of regional economic recovery"--Provided by publisher.

Excerpt from Historic Storms of New England: Its Gales, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Showers With Thunder and Lightning, Great Snow Storms, Rains, Freshets, Floods, Droughts, Cold Winters, Hot Summers, Avalanches, Earthquakes, Dark Days, Comets, Aurora-Borealis, Phenomena in the Heavens New England lies between the torrid and the frigid zones, and its climate often suddenly changes from that of one zone to that of the other, having at times the hot wind and air of the south, and again the snow and ice and cold of the north. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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