![]() ![]() He eventually made it home, where a friend’s yacht had crashed through the glass front door and lodged in the hedge between his yard and the Episcopal church next door. Now it is a stretch of ice cream shops, cafes and expensive boutiques then it was a roiling sea of floating cars and boats, dead animals and people swimming for their lives. ![]() He turned his truck around, trying to outrun it, until he abandoned the truck on Main Street. Before long, he saw a tidal wave of water roaring toward him in a great gray mass. So she remembers the way her father, a car dealer, went off in his wrecker to rescue a stranded car in the lull when the eye passed over. Lest we forget, a few reminders of what happened in the past and what will happen again, sooner or later. A storm like the one in 1938 would surely be one of the costliest in American history if it hit Long Island. It’s a different world, much safer for people because of better communications and evacuation and rescue plans, but infinitely riskier for property damage, with so much having been built since then. 21, 1938, which killed more than 50 people on Long Island, 29 of them here, and more than 600 over all. On a gorgeous end-of-summer afternoon, with those Weather Channel tracking maps likely more worrisome because of rain and wind or imperiled Labor Day parties than for anything more ominous close to home, it’s almost impossible to wrap your brain around a major hurricane hitting Long Island.īut as Hurricane Earl churns haphazardly north, and as we begin our seasonal dance of voyeurism, alarm and indifference, there are still people around who remember the last really big one: the Long Island Express of Sept. For those few who still remember, the images are seared into their brains: the corpses floating down Main Street or propped up on chairs in the temporary morgue at the Westhampton County Club the boats that drifted into the living rooms of flooded houses the dead dogs and featherless chickens the muck and fish stink the moonscape of flattened houses on Dune Road the residue of the last great hurricane to hit Long Island, the storm of 1938. ![]()
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