|
New book chronicles state’s disasters
In the midst of the past month’s mix of hearing about the unfolding disaster left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and looking up accounts of Jackson County’s great flood on the occasion of its 65th anniversary, a most appropriate book found its way into the Cafe.
“Disasters and Heroic Rescues of North Carolina,” written by Scotti Cohn is subtitled “True Stories of Tragedy and Survival,” and the book’s cover promises “true triumphs of the human spirit.”
It delivers on all accounts. The closest disasters to our community are two in Asheville – the 1916 flood and the 1948 Highland Hospital fire. The book has an entire chapter of the floods of August 1940, but instead of the late-August torrents that sent the Tuckaseigee and its tributaries to their highest levels on record, Cohn describes that year’s mid-August flood and its landslides and devastating effects on Wautauga County.
Cohn’s disasters include shipwrecks, airplane crashes, epidemics and snowstorms. Our blizzard of 1993 didn’t make the cut, but a February 2004 snow that blanketed Charlotte is there, along with the May 2000 pedestrian bridge collapse at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
What leaped out at me, in this most active hurricane season, was the chapter on Hurricane Hazel, which struck North Carolina’s coast in 1954. Hazel made herself known in the Caribbean almost exactly 51 years ago, on Oct. 5, 1954. Roaring over Haiti, the monster storm killed more than 400 people on Oct. 11 before heading for the Old North State.
On Oct. 14, a weather bureau volunteer in Southport, Jessie Taylor, began telling people in Fort Caswell, Long Beach, Holden Beach and Ocean Isle to evacuate. Since there were no telephones or television on the coast at that time, local law enforcement officers had to tell people in person to leave.
The next day, the storm’s wind and waves hit the North Carolina/South Carolina border. Hazel arrived during a full moon that already was bringing the coast the highest lunar tide of the year. The Category 4 hurricane was expected to lose intensity as it moved inland, but it was still so powerful when it reached Goldsboro that it knocked five school buses off the road, and Hazel still packed winds of almost 100 mph when it arrived in Raleigh.
At Calabash, the ocean rose 18 feet above the average low-water level, and Atlantic Beach suffered an 8-foot storm surge and 20-foot waves. The Red Cross was assisted by the National Guard as rescuers tried to aid the storm’s victims. Hazel caused 19 deaths, mostly in Brunswick County, and did $136 million in damage to the state’s beaches. Before Hazel was spent, the storm traveled through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Canada and crossed the Arctic Circle, claiming some 600 lives and causing $350 million in property damage.
After that performance, the name “Hazel” was retired for 10 years by the World Meteorological Organization. And Jessie Taylor, the volunteer who sounded the alarm, was honored by the weather bureau the following year for warning people and saving countless lives.
Cohn’s writing is interesting, and she mixes newspaper accounts of the various tragedies and triumphs with anecdotes and eye-witness accounts.
We learn that Zelda Fitzgerald (wife of “Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald) was a patient at Highlands at the time of the big fire, and that 22 inches of rain fell on Mitchell County over the course of one day during the July 1916 floods. The account of the Charlotte snowstorm (“White Wedding, Black Ice”) is personalized through the eyes of bride and groom Anne Baltz and Ryan Kelley, who had planned (and succeeded) in being married the Saturday after the big storm. And newlyweds figure in the Hurricane Hazel chapter as well – Cohn tells us of the Long Beach couple who rode out the storm using their mattress as a makeshift raft.
Published by Globe Pequot Press, “Disasters and Heroic Rescues of North Carolina” is part of the publisher’s Disasters and Heroic Rescues series.
|
