The Hurricanes That Caught America Off-Guard

Hurricane Milton’s wind and rain lashed Florida overnight—flooding streets, spawning tornadoes, and sending sheets of a fiberglass stadium roof billowing like tissue paper. As they did just weeks before, people in the Southeast have cycled through another round of evacuations, storm surges, and waking up to survey the damage. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, houses that were once up the street are now downriver, and entire communities have been “wiped off the map.” One survivor told CNN that “the smell of decay, and the smell of loss of life … will probably stick with me the rest of my life.” Many are living in a world not so much upside down as erased.

Less than a century ago, New England was in a similar position. As in North Carolina before Helene, rainstorms saturated the Northeast’s soil and overwhelmed its rivers. Then, a Category 3 hurricane traced a fishhook path across the Atlantic and slammed the New England coastline on September 21, 1938. Later nicknamed the “Long Island Express” and the “Yankee Clipper,” after the areas it damaged the most, the storm took almost everybody by surprise; no one had expected it to travel that far north—meteorologists included. According to Atlantic writer Frances Woodward’s report, a gust of wind had toppled a crate of tomatoes in front of a New England grocery store early that day. An onlooker speculated a hurricane might be brewing. Another scoffed: “Whad’ye think this is, Palm Beach?”

When the storm hit, people were caught “alone and unprepared,” according to the editors’ note on Woodward’s story. Residents watched as the physical world gave way around them: Streets were engulfed by “the sea itself,” inundated with a “bulk of green water which was not a wave, was nothing there was a name for,” Woodward observed. Long Island Railroad tracks were damaged, Montauk temporarily became an island, and more than 600 people died. “Curious to see the houses you knew so well, the roofs under which you had lived, tilt, and curtsy gravely—hesitate, and bow—and cease to exist,” Woodward wrote.

After the flooding receded, people gathered to assess the damage. Their towns didn’t feel like home anymore, Woodward recalled: “It was just some place out of a cold-sweated dream … the sour smell on the air. And the alien face of the harbors, blue and placid, with shore lines no one could recognize.” As the sun set, fires burned along the waterfront. “It was a sort of nightmare background to the wet and the cold and the feeling of being still as confused as you had been in the wind.”

The year 1938 had already been a difficult one. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Edward A. Weeks, could have been describing 2024 when he wrote in the aftermath of the New England hurricane: “We have all had too much worry, too much recession, too much politics, too much hurricane, too much fear of war.” Survivors asked then, as they are now, How do you begin again?

I’d hoped there might be an answer in The Atlantic’s archives. But what I found instead was a story that repeats itself after every natural disaster: People sift through the rubble, searching for missing loved ones. They take stock of what they have left, and figure out a way to rebuild. “You got used to it, in a way, if you kept going,” Woodward wrote.

Maybe there’s a comfort in knowing that our predecessors weren’t sure how to handle this moment either. One of the earliest mentions of a hurricane in The Atlantic comes from a poem by Celia Thaxter, published in April 1868. After a hurricane causes a shipwreck, a lighthouse keeper laments how unfair it is that the ocean can still look beautiful, when so many sailors have died in it. He asks God how He could have allowed so much suffering; in response, a voice tells him to “take / Life’s rapture and life’s ill, / And wait. At last all shall be clear.”

Sighing, the man climbs the lighthouse steps.