What, never heard of the Great Hurricane of 1938? The one with 50 ft waves and blindingly fast travel that killed 700 persons and made more than 63,000 homeless, in one four hour stretch? Well, that’s what happens when your news hits the same week that Hitler snatches the Sudetenland, I suppose.
Disasters often make my reading list. I think there’s a lot to be learned from how real people faced and reacted to real crises. That’s what got me reading The Great Hurricane: 1938 by Cherie Burns. Here are some lessons I took away from The Great Hurricane.
This NOAA image isn’t literally from the Great Hurricane, but it depicts what occurred time and time again in descriptions of the event: Houses that had always been dozens of feet above sea level with the ocean entering through third story windows and floating away whole houses.
Normalcy Bias Kills
This is not unique to the Great Hurricane. Normalcy bias has killed more people than giant lizards in a Godzilla filmfest. Normalcy bias is when you expect things to stay similar to “how they’ve always been”. In the Great Hurricane it was “It’s just a Nor’Easter; we don’t get hurricanes in Long Island/Rhode Island/Connecticut”. (spoiler: sorry, sometimes they do)
It’s normalcy bias that led people to believe that they’d be fine to shelter in place even when that place was a stone’s throw from the sea…because those dunes were higher than they’d ever seen the waves. As the climate changes, one thing we’re seeing is that extreme weather tends to get even more extreme.
Better to apply that financial caveat to natural disasters: Past results do not (fully) predict future performance.
Indecision can be fatal
A particularly heartbreaking story from the Great Hurricane involved a pair of brothers who spent an hour debating if it was worth the hassle to move their boat to a more protected mooring. They decided they must, but too late. The lightning-fast storm caught them before they could round the point.
In another case, a man just could not commit to trying to force through the rapidly rising water and just clung to a fencepost. When the water rose too high, he was lost.
What good does this observation do? No one decides to be indecisive, of course.
It’s all about mental preparation. If you have a plan as to how you could handle a situation, when the circumstances get too overwhelming or happen too fast you can default to your plan instead of freezing.
When I was learning to drive, my Mom taught me the mental exercise of “What If”. What if I had to leave my lane right now, which way should I go? If you do these mental exercises when there is no stress, you’ll have something (probably) useful to do when you have to choose right now.
Rubbernecking wins Darwin awards
A “Darwin award” is when one removes one’s genes from the population by doing something so abominably stupid it’s fatal.
Going out for a drive to check out the damage or see the situation before that situation stabilizes is both shockingly common and abominably stupid. In the Great Hurricane, it was folks going out to the beach to marvel at waves higher than they’d ever seen. Just before the storm surge brought those waves right over them. In my town, I’ve seen people driving their trucks around and posting on social media about how they were checking things out…as a tornado touched down less than a mile away. They were finalists in the Darwin Award competition, but got away with it that day. Don’t count on their luck.
Be willing to leave behind what you can do without
The woman who snapped at the young man to “not rush her while she packed her bag” and missed her ride was later found in the wreckage. With her bag still on her arm.
The couple that didn’t trust banks and left shelter to grab their cash from their house at the height of the storm was never seen again.
You get the idea. It’s just Stuff. I doubt you’ll value it when it’s still clutched in your cold, dead hands. “Let it go, Indiana.”
A grab-bag of nuggets from the Great Hurricane
Here’s some other tidbits I gathered and wanted to share:
- Don’t drive through water.
- Being too proud or fearful to accept help from strangers has caused far more harm during disasters than treacherous strangers, so far as I can tell.
- Looting started surprisingly early, with many looters swimming through flood waters to reach their targets. (Some drowned, too.)
- Chainsaws can be important to mobility. My sister lives out in the woods, and has had to use a chainsaw (always in her trunk) both to get in and out after various wind events.
Obviously this road had already been cleared before the picture, but given the state of the trees you can see why whole towns burned down when the fire crews could not travel the roads until after liberal use of chainsaws.