Century stories

5.24.99
Barrington residents recall storm's battering
'We ran when the trees started coming down'

By SAM NITZE
Journal Staff Writer

BARRINGTON -- On the afternoon of Sept. 21, 1938, Michael Farina was caddying at the Rhode Island Country Club.

The sky darkened, an eerie half-light spread over the course, and, slowly at first, wind began to churn in the trees.

''One of the guys was from Florida, and he said 'Hey, this looks like the beginning of a hurricane,' '' Farina, 80, recalled last week. ''But the others didn't believe him. They didn't know what he was talking about.

''We ran when the trees started coming down, though,'' he added.

All over the state, the hurricane took people by surprise.

''The story can never emphasize too much the element of people's unawareness of the hurricane's imminence,'' a Journal reporter wrote at the time. ''And the strange, weird thought, even as the wild storm was shattering the community, that it was a fantastic piece of imagination, a mad dream.''

But it was not a dream.

The storm gathered strength, battering towns along the shore and creating monstrous waves in Narragansett Bay and its estuaries, according to an account published by the Warren Printing and Publishing Co.

In the Bay Spring and Annawamscutt Beach communities -- two of the hardest hit -- 75 homes were destroyed, the report said. The entire town lost power, gas and water, and many of the major roads were blocked by fallen trees.

Barrington Parkway was inundated and water surged across the train tracks, flooding the cove at the edge of the Metacomet golf course, a Journal report said. A car and its driver were knocked into the mud near the golf course, and the man drowned, ''trapped beneath the rush of water.''

The waters off Rumstick Point were pushed north, gaining speed and volume, until they eventually carried away the bridge near the white church, killing another motorist, the report said.

Nicholas Gizzarelli Sr., the town historian, said he was in the fire station on County Road when the storm hit. He recalled that he and the other firefighters had to walk to reach the devastation in West Barrington.

''We tried to go down County Road in a car, but the streets were all under water,'' he recalled. ''It was tough, tough, tough.''

Along the beaches, rescue workers discovered the bodies of people killed or injured in the storm, many of them washed ashore from across the Bay, Gizzarelli said.

He recalled helping one woman who had been blown across from Warwick on the floor of her collapsed home.

''We found her behind the ice cream parlor, on her floor, crying because her sister had been knocked off during the crossing,'' Gizzarelli said.

Gizzarelli spent three or four days in Bay Spring working in a Red Cross relief station set up in the old fire house. He was responsible for cooking, making sandwiches, and brewing coffee for those whose homes had been destroyed, he said.

When he finally returned home, making his way through downed trees along Maple Avenue, he was exhausted. The first days were over, but the town's recovery had only just begun.