Sudden Sea by R.A. Scotti Read Free Book Online

Hurricane of 1938 was shaping up to be a big, sprawling mother storm — some five hundred miles in diameter, as big as the state of Ohio.
    Although Galileo proved long ago that man is not the center of the universe, we tend to take weather personally. If it rains, it is raining on our parade. If it shines, it is shining for our benefit. Most days we go along blithely unconcerned that directly over our heads is a vast, never static sea of gases that we can’t control and only partially understand. That gaseous ocean is immense and mysterious, yet we largely ignore it until weather as formidable as an extreme hurricane strikes and we face a force infinitely mightier and more savage than ourselves.
    Monday, September 19
    With a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane poised to strike Miami–Palm Beach, the rest of the country finally glanced south. The
New York Times
ran a front-page story, hurricane in atlantic heads toward florida, warning that the Weather Bureau was expecting “a storm of dangerous proportions.” Newspapers in New England printed the alarm as well.
    At eight o’clock Monday morning, daylight saving time, the hurricane was about 650 miles east-southeast of Florida, centered at latitude 23° north, longitude 70° west, and moving at twenty miles an hour. If it maintained a constant speed and direction, it would pass through the Bahamas overnight, spreading gales and squalls over a wide area. Winds would pick up along the Florida coast, and Miami would wake up with the hurricane on its doorstep. At 10:30 A.M. Jacksonville issued a clear warning:
Florida’s east coast is in the danger zone of this storm and all interests are urged to stand by for possible hurricane warnings during the day.
    Though not the mangrove swamp it had been before the land rush of the 1920s, Miami in the thirties was a far cry from its later Gold Coast years. The heyday of Lincoln Road and Collins Avenue would not arrive until after the war, and the big push of luxury hotels and motel strips would not happen until the fifties. Except for the extravagant Roney Plaza, the sands north of the famous crossroads were mostly barren. Sportsmen went to the Keys for the deep-sea fishing, and gamblers and high rollers headed to Havana. The southern terminus of wealth was Palm Beach.
    On a good day in 1938, Miami felt like a town frozen in time. The city had woken up from the grandiose dream of the winter playland pioneered by entrepreneur Carl Fisher and railroad tycoon Henry Morrison Flagler. In its place was the bleak reality of the Great Depression. Homes and office buildings begun before the crash stood unfinished. Streets laid out in the land grab of the twenties defined empty neighborhoods.
    Miami had been on full alert throughout the weekend, and by Monday morning the city looked like a frontier film set on a Hollywood back lot. The pastel town was a drab fortress brown. Stucco and glass facades were wrapped in protective timber. Billboards had been taken down, dangling street signs removed. The Red Cross had turned police stations and schools into emergency shelters, bringing in cots and setting up first-aid stations. Drygoods stores were doing a land-office business. There was a run on candles, flashlights, batteries, and kerosene lamps. Grocery store shelves were suddenly bare. Floridians stocked up on food and ordered extra ice blocks for their iceboxes. At home they filled every spare receptacle with water — stockpots, pitchers, barrels, buckets, jugs, sinks, and bathtubs.
    Waiting and watching as a hurricane approaches land is tantamount to playing the seventh game of the World Series. Everything is on the line. Except to wash and change their clothes, Grady Norton and Gordon Dunn had not left the weather station since Friday. Every detail, every decision, what they did and what they failed to do would be critical. The two men were at the breaking point. “By the time you wrestle with one of these big blows for a couple of days