01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, September 21, 2005

On an ordinary day in the middle of an ordinary week at the end of an ordinary summer, southern New England was attacked by one of the most extraordinary storms on record. And in the 67 years that have come and gone since that notorious Wednesday, Sept. 21, and the catastrophe that was the Great Hurricane of 1938, our memories seem to have eroded like sand dunes in the wind.

It's a day we might want to remember.

Which is precisely what the eighth graders from the Jamestown School were doing last Thursday when they walked over to the town's library to meet the author of a book from their summer reading list. In case they had never heard the stories before, Sudden Sea made sure they keenly understood what could and did happen on the very island where they live.

The restaurant that was swept across the street and dropped on the front porch of somebody's house. The ferryboat that was washed up on a seaside lawn a half mile from its landing. The school bus that foundered on a narrow strip of land and was swallowed up by the angry ocean. The children who never made it home that day.

As you might expect from a former journalist, R.A. Scotti's in-depth research and reporting cuts a swath through all the historical, meteorological and factual territory that's as wide and all encompassing as, well, the storm itself.

But as the Jamestown eighth graders were quick to point out, it's the stories she carefully fashioned together from her interviews of survivors and published accounts that make her book so unforgettable. It's her way of bringing you into the homes and families of those in harm's way that forces you to consider the true measurement of a hurricane's devastation. That it has less to do with its wind speed -- even though this one was clocked as high as 186 miles per hour -- than with how many lives were blown to bits on that long-ago Wednesday.

It's a day we should remember.

And although those who planned the summer reading list couldn't have possibly foreseen that by the time school rolled around there would be another hurricane dominating the news, the students were quick to ask about the comparison to Katrina. It was very different, Scotti told them, because of the duration of Katrina's flooding. However, the similarity between the two storms, she noted, was the large number of people who were affected.

ACCORDING TO Scotti, hurricanes typically threaten us with three weapons: waves, wind and rain. But the Great Hurricane of 1938 had a fourth weapon in its deadly arsenal: surprise. The forecasters were sure the hurricane that had been threatening Florida for days would follow the path of so many others and blow itself out at sea. The forecasters were sure the tropical storm warnings they issued for the Northeast at 10 that morning would be more than sufficient. The forecasters were sure in for a surprise.

Just as we all were surprised when the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain ruptured, plunging a city and its people into a watery hell. Not that we should have been. There had been warnings. There had been concerns.

Of course, the likelihood of a hurricane taking Rhode Island by surprise ever again is remote. Our forecasting technology is so much more sophisticated now. If only we could say the same for our memories.

Immediately following the Great Hurricane of 1938, owners watched helplessly as the value of their beachfront property sunk like a stone in the surf. Assuming they still had any beachfront property at all. Whatever hard lessons we learned in Jamestown and Newport and Watch Hill and Westerly on that fearful Wednesday, we apparently would rather forget.

Sept. 21, 1938.

It's a day we'd better remember.

Rita Lussier can be reached at ReetsAL [at] aol.com or by mail c/o Features Department, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain Street, Providence, RI 02902.