Century stories

5.24.99
Hurricane compounded troubles
''The depression and the hurricane. Those were the two greatest tragedies of my life,'' a Fall River man says.

By MARIE SANCHEZ
Journal Staff Writer

As residents coped with the economic disaster, nature rained her fury on them in 1938. Literally tearing up towns in spots, wiping out dwellings from shorelines, rolling parts of the bay onto streets, uprooting trees, and sending roofs flying all in a sudden, thunderous, crashing, shrieking surge.

It started out slowly enough. ''I was coming home from school,'' said Edna Altham, 81. ''I saw a tree fall across the telephone truck. When I got home and told my mother she promptly slapped me across my face for lying.''

''Just then, the neighbor's chimney fell on my father's car, crushing the roof.''

The hurricane came without warning on Sept. 21 around 3 p.m. Gust by gust and wave by wave, it would grow into the ''most costly and fatal single disaster the country has ever sustained,'' as insurance companies characterized it.

The storm spent itself around 7:30 p.m. And the next day was fair and fine.

But the devastation left in the hurricane and flood's wake was immense in Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island: More than 300 people killed, nearly 2,000 houses ripped from their foundations, and an estimated $100 million in damages -- this in 1938 dollars.

The newspapers described on the day following the fury ''fantastic scenes beyond the wildest imagination . . . to those towns particularly that line the shores of the Bay.''

The History of Somerset describes how the storm's full 121-mph cataclysmic force visited the town: Thousands of trees were uprooted. Houses floated away or were smashed to kindling wood. A 20-foot tidal wave covered the horizon as it drove up the bay, then narrowed up the funnel of the river at the speed of an Amtrak train. Seven people lost their lives.

The tanker Phoenix, loaded with 57,000 barrels of gas, was ripped from its moorings at the Shell Company dock in Fall River, and ''drove at the Fernald Hanson house with whistle shrieking warning, veered, and went ashore on Riverside Avenue so close to the residence of Adam W. Gifford that its dragging anchor chain demolished the front porch,'' the history continues.

The stranded vessel's prow towering above the road made it a favorite among national newsreels and pictures. Thousands clamored to visit the Pheonix until salvagers floated it, and sold it into commission.

The New Haven had moored at the Fall River Line docks, and when the dust settle, landed on Brayton Point too high to float. Its destiny was to be dismantled and burned for its metal.

An Attleboro resident remembered how his mother sent him to the store to buy milk, not realizing how bad the storm was. He went dodging trees that came crashing down around him.

Others recalled how windows bulged inward, and shattered glass covered living rooms, people were swept out to sea. Downtown Providence was raging under floodwaters.

Five years later, obituaries mentioned people who died from illnesses related to the hurricane.

In Fall River, 67-year-old Rene Banville remembered a ''man got blown thirty feet into the air.''

''The depression and the hurricane,'' he said. ''Those were the two greatest tragedies of my life.''