The Great Atlantic Hurricane

A U.S. Navy photo from an unknown location in the Northeast during the Great Atlantic Hurricane. Photo by U.S. Navy.

A wave of energy moved off the coast of Africa. Winds were sucked into the atmospheric depression and curved by the Earth's spin into a counterclockwise rotation.

The storm churned unnoticed across the open sea, gathering strength from warm tropical waters.

U.S. Weather Bureau forecasters in Florida, issued a hurricane warning for Miami, expecting the storm to hit Tuesday. Miami residents stockpiled supplies, boarded windows, secured boats.

But on Monday evening, the storm turned north and sped up to 20 mph, a swift forward speed that scientists of the time knew little about. It followed a typical path of recurvature -- resembling a giant C -- around the Bermuda High, an area of high atmospheric pressure in the mid-Atlantic that pushes air outward from its center, bouncing hurricanes off its edges like bubbles.

The track of the storm was lost off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina -- it was assumed it would curve eastward. The national weather map showed no hurricane, only a storm moving out to sea.

But winds had increased to 140 mph inside the beast. It moved north and picked up more forward speed.

The Bermuda High had moved to 44 degrees North latitude -- from its normal September position of thirty to thirty-five degrees -- blocking the hurricane's path and deflecting it northward. Abnormally warm water fed the storm as its forward speed increased to 60 mph!

No warnings were issued. It had been 117 years since the last great storm hit New York. History had been forgotten.

By Wednesday afternoon, shingles were flying from roofs on Long Island. The sky grew dark. Trees were uprooted and telephone poles snapped like matchsticks. Three hours before high tide, residents reported a thick bank of gray fog, twenty-five to forty feet above the water, rolling in toward the south-facing coast.

Some residents fled to relative safety across the bridge. Many did not. Most of them died as the "fog bank" turned out to be a wall of water known as a storm surge.

Created partly by the vacuum of reduced atmospheric pressure and more so by the wind blowing over the water, the storm surge was highest in an area just east of the eye -- the right side of the storm when looked at from above. There, in the right-side eyewall, the counterclockwise winds combined with the storm's forward speed to create gusts exceeding 200 mph!

The eye of the hurricane passed some 55 miles east of Manhattan, a near miss in meteorological terms. Had it been a few miles west of Manhattan, forensic hurricanologists agree it would have devastated the island.

The storm marched north. In Rhode Island, residents joked about putting up storm shutters. Finally, at least a warning had been issued. But the ferocity of the hurricane was no match for any last-minute preparations that might have been made.

At the head of Narragansett Bay, 30 miles from the Atlantic, the city of Providence awaited a fate its inhabitants could not have imagined. As the hurricane barreled toward the city, it pushed a surge of water up the bay. As the channel narrowed and became more shallow, the storm surge had nowhere to go but up.

The mountain of water carried boats and houses into the capital, flooding the first floor of buildings in downtown, where workers were just preparing to go home. Having no idea what a storm surge was, many of them were trapped and drowned where they worked.

In all, 600 people died.

The year was 1938. But, it could happen next week. -- ###

Excerpt from an article By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Senior Writer.

Click map to see the latest forecast track.

UPDATE: Hurricane Bill became a dangerous Category 4 storm Wednesday with winds near 135 mph — and forecasters say it could get even stronger. -- FOX News

Learn more about hurricanes and what you should do to prepare for one by clicking here.