09:43 AM EDT on Sunday, August 29, 2004

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Morning in Sakonnet Harbor brought the sounds of a storm. From a berth in his sailboat he could hear wind moaning through the rigging. Even in the shelter of the harbor the waves broke with a hiss.

Tom Congdon and his two shipmates, then recent graduates of Yale University, thought about rowing ashore in the dinghy. They quickly gave up that idea as too risky.

Their ship-to-shore radio filled the cabin of their 36-foot sloop with urgent voices calling, one coming from as close as Cuttyhunk island. A man had rowed ashore that morning to pick up the paper, and he could not get back to his family on their boat, now adrift in the teeth of Hurricane Carol.

"Their radio cries for help left us numb," Congdon writes now in a letter of that day 50 years ago. "We never learned their names. But we realized that persons around us were losing their lives and we were now in a deadly serious situation."

With a crack like a gunshot, the mooring of Congdon's boat snapped. His shiny black sailboat, Corbeau, heeled nearly 90 degrees; the boat raced sideways through the harbor to open sea.

Wearing heavy, World-War-II-era lifejackets, Congdon and his friends clung to the side of the hull.

"The waves were huge -- small, gray mountains foaming at their peaks," Congdon writes. "Visibility was tightly limited by the lashing spray . . . We kept our eyes lowered less the wind actually blow our eyes upward."

MICHAEL TRAGER and his 6-year-old sister, Karen Ann, spent the summer of 1954 at their grandparents' beach house in East Matunuck, near the South Kingstown town beach.

When Hurricane Carol struck on Aug. 31, 1954, his grandmother bundled the children into the car; his grandfather, John Bergman, turned the key and -- thunk -- nothing happened. The engine was too wet. Even if it had turned over there was no place to go; the Potter Pond Bridge on Succotash Road had washed out, stranding hundreds at East Matunuck.

Just before the bridge went, state police Trooper Daniel J. O'Brien, 25, pushed a stalled car across with his cruiser. He recrossed Potter Pond Bridge in his car, a 1950s coupe with a big flashing light, to see if he could find others to rescue. The trooper's hat was found a few hours later. They found his body near Succotash Road.

The storm surge breached the dunes and waves slapped against the walls of Bergman's summer house. Michael was just 12 years old as he told this story to a Providence Journal reporter:

He left his grandfather's car and, with a stone, he broke the window of a nearby house. There he took three green lifejackets and ran back to the car. Mr. Bergman helped the others clip on the life vests.

"I saw a blown-over bathhouse float by," the 12-year-old Michael said. He grabbed onto it. From the car he heard his little sister shout, "I want to go with you!"

But he was adrift.

"The last I could see, my grandfather was sitting in the car, which was half under water, and my grandmother and Karen Ann were climbing on top of a stalled trailer nearby. From then on the wind got too strong, and I couldn't look back."

HURRICANE CAROL snuck up on Rhode Island, a stealthy killer in the night. The Providence Journal of the day before carried a story about the storm on Page 9, headlined: "Hurricane Now Losing Strength."

A weather report on the same page read: "Cloudy and cool tonight. Considerable cloudiness and little change in temperature tomorrow."

Next to that was a column called "What's Going On Today." There was horse racing at Narragansett Park, a Naval Reserve drill on Fields Point, and the Strand Theater featured Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in Living it Up.

Television didn't make much of the storm either. There were only three channels then, 4, 7 and 10, viewed on black-and-white TVs; at 5:30 p.m., two of the three channels broadcast The Howdy Doody Show.

On the day it hit, Aug. 31, 1954, Hurricane Carol had pushed its way to Page 1, where that day's Providence Journal published two stories about the approaching storm.

The lead weather story said: "The late weather forecasts from Boston indicated, however, that the northeasterly winds might reach 50 to 60 miles an hour by early afternoon along the coast."

1954 was the second year that the National Weather Service named tropical systems. The other story explained that this was the third hurricane of the season, thus it was initialed with the third letter of the alphabet, C as in Carol.

That story also reported that a ship off the coast of Georgia had radioed: "Passed thru eye of Carol, northwest wind 125 miles per hour after eye passed. Carol has beautiful rainbow in her eye."

When that eyewall struck Rhode Island at 11:37 p.m., the wind shrieked at a sustained 100 mph with higher blasts, toppling whole orchards, sinking boats in their slips, and rolling beach houses as if they were dice.

ON THE DAY of the storm, Gaetano Gallo, then 35, told a reporter this story:

"We were in the house, the three of us. We had been there since July. We were listening to the radio but there was no alarm."

The house was on Seaview Drive in Warwick's Oakland Beach, a summer place owned by his parents, Francesco and Catherine, who were in their 70s. As survivors of the Great Depression, they mistrusted banks. They kept their life savings of $30,000 cash in that house.

A hard rain had raked Rhode Island the previous night, and the wind that morning was already stronger than predicted.

"We weren't worried at first," Gallo said. "Then the water began to rise. The waves were pounding on the beach. My mother got hysterical."

A firefighter waded out to the house. He said he'd be back to check on the Gallos. "He never came back.

"About 9:30 [a.m.], the waves tore off the doors and windows on the first floor. My father and mother and I climbed to the second story. My mother was crying."

At 10:30 a.m., the National Weather Service issued a hurricane warning; 15 minutes later, a 100 mph wind socked Rhode Island.

Slowly the water rose through the Gallo house, filling the first floor from floor to ceiling. Gallo huddled with his parents in a second-story bedroom, which also began to fill. "The water rose four feet in the bedroom. The house began to rock from side to side.

"Then I grew confused, but I remember the house breaking apart and it getting dark. I went down under water, dazed and confused, but held my breath and kept bobbing up and down, trying to breathe.

"Then the walls backed open and the roof slid off to one side. Somehow I found an exit and got clear of the house. My parents had disappeared."

Gallo clung to a piece of the house on a pitching sea, the wind screaming past his ears, flinging spray and debris.

"God was with me," he said. "I lost the house and several thousands of dollars in cash in the house. But I do not care about that. I only miss my parents."

His parents, Francesco and Catherine Gallo, were two of Hurricane Carol's 65 dead, 19 killed in Rhode Island.

ON OAKLAND Beach's Bay Avenue, Henry Konze, his wife, son, and their three collie dogs were trapped in their house when waves pulled it off the foundation.

"The house seemed to lift up," Konze said then. "And the ride began."

Water rose to their necks. "My three collie dogs were swimming around. One of them began to sink down. We grabbed him by the tail. Then another landed against me and scratched my arm and ear."

Mrs. Konze -- who in true 1950s style was referred to in the newspaper only as Mrs. Henry Konze -- said, "My, how we prayed. We shouted our prayers. I shouted loud my favorite prayer, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help us."

With the collie dogs swimming, the house swaying, and Mrs. Konze shouting her prayers, the house floated for 100 yards before stopping with a thump.

"Must have been that we were on higher ground," Konze said. "Anyway, two men in rescue boats came and got us. My wife is right. We did shout our prayers."

AT 11 A.M., a judge in the Providence County Superior Court on South Main Street called a recess. The river was rising; people had to move their cars.

Reporter Francis L. Murphy of The Providence Journal peered through a courthouse window at the scene below.

"Swiftness with which hundreds of autos were inundated was appalling," Murphy wrote. "Cars swirled around on parking lots and streets like unruly cabin cruisers."

The black, oily waters of the rising river coursed through Exchange Place, later renamed Kennedy Plaza. The flood busted through plate-glass windows; it flowed into the first floor of the Biltmore and sloshed from wall to wall, 4 feet deep. Streets became canals surging with deep, dirty water.

Water slapped up the steps of City Hall, where people clustered above the rising tide. An 18-year-old man was pulled from the water exhausted, after he swam over to the Industiral National Bank Building to check on a girlfriend who worked there. On the return leg of his swim he nearly drowned.

"At Eddy and Westminster Streets, the fire department's brand new rescue truck was stalled in 6 feet of water, wrote reporter Robert C. Frederiksen. "The red light atop the cab flashed incessantly.

"Dorrance Street was an angry river, dirty gray and flecked with whitecaps and spray."

AT NOON, Hurricane Carol's eye rode the western edge of Rhode Island; an eerie calm settled across the state. Even off the coast of Sakonnet, the winds laid down.

The black sailboat, Corbeau, raven in French, righted itself. Exhausted sea birds, white gulls and terns, wheeled down from the blue eye, settling on Corbeau's spars and deck. They even alighted on the shoulders of the three men aboard.

"We knew what was coming next," writes Tom Congdon, who was adrift on the boat with his two friends, "the other side of the storm. . . . And it came. Over we went again and once more we clung to the outside of the hull. My fear was real."

The winds drove Corbeau across Old Bull Rock. The sailboat barrel-rolled, driven by breakers. The three Yale grads were pitched into the sea.

Congdon held one end of a rope; his friend, John Macomber, held the other. Their friend, Henry Koehler, an artistic soul who had given the boat its shiny black coat, was rolling somewhere in the waves.

"By now we were struggling to catch a breath before being battered under water by the next crest," Congdon recalls. "And with each enormous wave we knew we were being carried towrd that deadly shore."

The shore off Sakonnet is rocky; on a good day the waves break hard there. On this day, the tide was so high that it carried the three men above the rocks and dropped them on softer shores.

Seas swept Congdon and Macomber into a wooded area, where they could grab at trees and pull each other forward.

Koehler "was rolled up and down the manicured lawn of an estate until its elderly owner directed her butler to pluck him from the water." He lived to become an internationally known artist who sold paintings to Jacqueline Kennedy while she was first lady.

"We three shipwrecked sailors were taken in by wonderfully hospitable people," writes Congdon, who now lives in Aspen, Colo. "Hot baths and dry clothes cheered us up. . . . The sky cleared to a brilliant blue."

Their black boat rested far up a cobble beach, demasted, its hull stove in. But of two cases of wine in the bilge, only one bottle had broken.

As word of their story spread, fishermen and others who worked the sea stopped by just to touch them, the lucky ones.

IN GALILEE, the entire village was marooned. A fleet of 77 fancy cabin cruisers, in town for the U.S. Atlantic Tuna Tournament, was scattered through parking lots and marshes. Seven of the ships had sunk; 17 more were sinking.

Sand Hill Cove Road, the only road into Galilee, was buried beneath newly piled dunes. About 350 people straggled out from the fish plant at the village center, where they had ridden out the storm.

They saw the sinking cabin cruisers, the buried road. They also saw a gray-haired woman lying dead by the fish plant. She wore a green life preserver.

East Matunuck was also cut off from the rest of the world, its bridge washed out. Trooper O'Brien's cruiser sat empty, engulfed in a newly formed salt pond. Nearby lay the body of a little girl, about 6 years old, with blue eyes and blonde hair.

Twelve-year-old Michael Trager's grandmother and his little sister, Karen Ann, had finally come to rest.

Trager, lying on a floating door, was pulled from the sea at Snug Harbor -- alive.

HURRICANE Carol hit a year after the end of the Korean War. That hurricane and that war both were overshadowed by larger, proximate events -- the Hurricane of 1938, World War II.

The 1938 Hurricane blew longer and harder than Hurricane Carol, and it killed more people: 262 in Rhode Island, compared to 19.

But Hurricane Carol also left its impression on this state.

In Galilee, tourists heading for Salty Brine Beach or the Block Island Ferry now ride along the Escape Road. On a sunny summer day the road's name connotes an idyllic escape to the shore or the island.

In fact, the road's name is a pragmatic statement of what it is: an escape from the shore when the sea turns deadly.

In Providence, Hurricane Carol's flood waters rose within a foot of the the Hurricane of 1938's highwater mark. Carol's storm surge wiped out businesses and destroyed 3,500 cars downtown.

Two deep and disastrous floods in 16 years was more than Providence was willing to take. Within a year of Hurricane Carol, a controversial plan was in the works to build a hurricane barrier across the wide mouth of the Providence River. Some mocked it as "fantastic," and said it could never be done.

It took 10 more years and $18 million to plan and build it.

In 1991, 25 years after its completion, the hurricane barrier's doors swung shut against the surging Providence River as Hurricane Bob barreled up Narragansett Bay. The 10-foot storm surge was turned back; downtown Providence stayed dry, a legacy of Hurricane Carol.

DIGITAL EXTRA: View more images of Hurricane Carol's impact, browse an Evening Bulletin "hurricane extra" front page, and post memories of the storm, at:

http://projo.com/extra/2004/hurricanecarol/