Their locks assume a baneful form.”
—Hebert
At the end of August, 1954, when the hurricane named “Carol” devastated Long Island and the southern coast of New England, it did a tremendous amount of property damage, principally on the shores of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. There was sharp criticism of the weathermen and the hurricane hunters. People claimed that the warning came only a few hours ahead of the big winds and the high storm tides. The weathermen answered that there really was no delay on their part in giving out the warning. They said that the hurricane hunters had been tracking Carol for several days and everybody had been warned that it was on the way. The hurricane simply started to move with great rapidity during that final night and there was no way of getting the warning to large numbers of people that early in the morning. It was after daylight when they got out of bed and turned on radio and television.
Of all the criticism, the sharpest and most prolonged was about the name of the hurricane. A newspaper in Massachusetts—the New Bedford Times—ran an editorial saying that it was not appropriate to give a nice name like Carol to a death-dealing and destructive monster of this kind. Other newspapers and many citizens here and there around the country joined in, partly in complaint and partly out of curiosity and the wish to get into the argument. A New Orleans woman wrote to the editor of the New Bedford Times that she would rather a storm would hit her house nameless than to run a chance of having it named after one of her husband’s old girl friends. Other women were incensed because storms had been called by their given names. The weathermen had a good explanation, but not many people seemed to sympathize with them. Persons who suffered losses of property were the most critical, saying that the name Carol gave the impression that the storm was not dangerous and that its winds and tides would not be much out of the ordinary.
The hurricane hunters were amazed by this reaction. Use of names for storms was not new. For a great many years the worst of the world’s storms have been given names, some before they struck with full force, but mostly afterward. Many were named after cities, towns or islands that were devastated. Others had gotten their names from some unusual weather that came with them or from ships that were sunk or damaged. One of them, as already has been related, was named “Kappler’s Hurricane” after a weather officer named Kappler who discovered it.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a New Englander, Sidney Perley, collected all the available records of storms and other disasters, together with strange phenomena in New England, starting with a big hurricane in 1635, when there were only a few settlers, and continuing down to 1890. His book, Historic Storms of New England, was published in Salem, in 1891. He listed floods, earthquakes, dark and yellow days, big meteors, eclipses, avalanches, droughts, great gales, tornadoes, hurricanes, and storms of hail and heavy snow. Prominent among them were the “Long Storm” of 1798, the “September Gale” of 1815, and the “Lighthouse Storm” of 1851.
The “Long Storm,” as the name suggests, was of long duration. It began on the seventeenth of November and continued with terrific gales and heavy snow until late on the twenty-first. This violent weather was unprecedented so early in the winter. From Perley’s account it seems that the center of the storm crossed Cape Cod. A great many vessels were lost and there was much suffering among the people.
The “September Gale” of 1815 became famous because of a poem written in later years by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was six years old at the time of the big gale. Holmes remembered and lamented the loss of his favorite pair of breeches, in part as follows:
“It chanced to be our washing day,
And all our things were drying;