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Summary: A deadly hurricane called 'The Long Island Express'
Review: Powerful hurricanes are infrequent visitors to New England. '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. The weatherman gave no cause for alarm. "Cloudy skies and gusty conditions" did nothing to warn New Englanders of the imminent arrival of a 500-mile wide hurricane with peak wind gusts of 180 miles an hour.This is how the book jacket of "A Wind to Shake the World" describes the coming of the storm: "No one could have been prepared for the storm's ferocity. Sweeping suddenly northward from Cape Hatteras, building tremendous momentum as it advanced, the hurricane raced over six hundred miles in only twelve hours. Winds of 100 to 130 miles an hour and swiftly rising water of almost tidal-wave proportions slammed into the shore from South Jersey to Boston, most severely from Long Island to Cape Cod." The hurricane struck Long Island around 3:30 PM. Few of the summer folk or permanent residents on the Island's south shore had a chance to escape, as waves between thirty and fifty feet high pounded the coastline. Entire homes and families were swept into the ocean. September 21st 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.' It took Allen over thirty years to recover from his own traumatic experiences during the storm, and write about one of the most under-reported natural disasters of 20th century America. Six hundred New Englanders were killed in less than twelve hours, and yet it is very difficult to find accounts of the hurricane that came to be called "The Long Island Express". I first heard of it in a story told by one of my Down East relatives--- "On the day of the hurricane, a Yankee farmer received a package containing a barometer that he had ordered through the mail. No matter how many times he tapped it, the mercury remained stuck at the bottom of the glass. Finally, he re-packaged the 'broken' barometer and returned it to the post office. By the time he got back to his own property, his house had washed out to sea." If you are an armchair junkie of natural disaster stories such as "Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History," you should definitely read "A Wind to Shake the World." Although the survivors were interviewed over thirty years after the hurricane, Allen wrote that some of them still wept, "to see again the sick color of sky and sea on that day, to hear the scream of the wind, which was everywhere...to see man himself, face down and weaving like weed in the roiling shallows or open-mouthed and still, half-buried in the damp sand."
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