Hurricane Gloria

I must have told you about the weekend in, I think, the spring of 1961 when nothing earth shaking seemed to be happening here and I did what a friend of mine used to call a 'hearth and home' talk and then, on Saturday, too late for me to scrap the original talk, a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, went around the earth in orbit, the first human to do it. And a critic wrote, 'One thing you must say for Cooke, when the last bomb has dropped on us all, he'll be there in New York still waffling away.'

Last week, I didn't exactly get caught in quite that way, but Sunday listeners, not to mention those in far-flung countries that hear these words on Monday or Tuesday, they must have thought that either I was remarkably blasé about an act of God or had retreated into the Midwest to escape it. For personal reasons we don't have to go into, I recorded my talk on the Wednesday for the usual transmissions on Friday and Sunday. On that day we were getting certainly wads of information about the development of Gloria into a full-blown hurricane – circular winds of 150 miles an hour, forward speed of 15 threatening damnation and destruction because it would stay out at sea, and when a hurricane does that, it sucks up more water, more movement, more terrifying power.

At that time on Wednesday 25 – it now seems about a month ago – the expert word from the now very vivid television performer Dr Neil Frank, head of the National Hurricane Center at Miami, Florida – Dr Frank told us that Gloria was headed north-west and, if it kept on that track, would hit Cape Hatteras, a low, sandy island that bulges out from the coast of North Carolina, but, if Gloria suddenly turned due west, it could make landfall to the south in South Carolina.

But, on the other hand – and Dr Frank lived up to his name by saying that – 'in 20 years great progress has been made in observing the life of a hurricane, but we still can't predict the final movement landfall'. So, if Gloria decided to veer only slightly north, it would miss Hatteras and hug the coastline and not smash ashore until Washington, the capital or, further north, the coast of New Jersey.

In that case, Atlantic City seemed a likely target and there was secret hope and rejoicing among Baptist fundamentalists and other true believers that the destruction of Atlantic City would mark the Lord's vengeance on that haven of gamblers, pimps, gangsters and other sinners.

By Thursday, when we were driving down Long Island, the rain came on for the first time in weeks. That was all right, normal. These hurricanes are a circle of whirling winds and come to form a weather system enormous in extent. Gloria had a waistline of 200 miles, but the fuss that her lashing skirts can cause produces winds and rain on all sides for six, seven, eight hundred miles.

Now, on Thursday evening, we turned on the news. Every network, every independent station in the nation had Gloria way up front as topic A. We learned more from Dr Frank. He'd slept about a couple of hours in 24 and, with the same vivacity – he loves his job – vivacity and candour, gave something over 200 interviews to television and radio stations, big and tiny. He told us that Gloria was veering now slightly north-north-east, but it is a hurricane's prerogative to change her mind.

So a hurricane watch, is the technical word, went out for everybody from the well-named Cape Fear at the southern tip of North Carolina all the way to the northern coast of Maine. Get out a map of Europe and stretch a danger zone of twelve hundred miles!

About 40 million people live along that wriggling coastline and in eleven states the National Guard was called out, the state police and the local police and the coastguard and all the fire departments, the hospitals, the paramedics and the carpenters and builders and electricians got busy evacuating the coastal residents inland into schools and motels and hotels and churches and office building basements.

And, before they left, a mighty banging could have been heard, nailing up boards and storm shutters over windows, shops, houses – everything in sight of the sea, which was now beginning to rage from the Carolinas up to Long Island. Over 30 million people were either evacuated inland or took at least these overnight precautions.

Thursday night was grey and very still – another normal, menacing sign – and we woke up on Friday morning on the top of our hundred-foot bluff or cliff to high winds, some slanting rain and the trees beginning to lash around. We had picked up from a transistor radio the last word from Dr Frank at about nine o'clock. Gloria had side-swiped North Carolina, much flooding, quite a lot of coastal damage, but was now headed due north-north-east. If it held that track, it would hit land on the south shore of Long Island in the middle of the island. It might edge a little east and landfall would be – where do you think? – at the eastern end of Long Island where the island splits into two fins or forks, enclosing the 30-mile long Peconic Bay – our bay, our luck!

That was the last we heard from Dr Frank on television since at one minute after ten o'clock, with the winds rising and the trees hissing and thrashing like idiots, the television went off. All our power. We'd already called our carpenter who arrived with two young stalwarts and they hammered up the storm shutters on the picture window that faces the south and the one that faces north-east and two others in two bedrooms.

We'd brought flashlights from New York and my wife had enough boxes of candles to light a high mass. We brought in all the terrace and porch furniture, including iron chairs that a strong man can lift, but a hurricane can toss like a newspaper and we descended to the bunker with bread and orange juice and liverwurst and tomatoes and a box of white peaches and soda water and water and the barley stimulant of Scotland and candles and two kerosene lamps, both of course for the dreaded evening and night.

The bunker had been built, sunk in the ground not as a storm shelter, but as a television viewing room, but I believe if the house had gone, the bunker would have stayed. I must say that if I have conveyed a continuous strain of fear, that's what I felt, because the hurricane centre was talking about the possibility of Gloria's being the storm of the century.

I had been here immediately after the monster of 21 September 1938. On that morning, the newspapers printed the weather forecast, rain and cooler. No more. There was no Hurricane Center in those days, no way of watching hurricanes get born and grow. No tracking by navy planes, nothing.

Well, by the evening of that same day, the avenue of high American elms along our main street had been ripped up and lifted the sidewalks with them so that you could tramp through shoulder-high trenches all along the streets. Our movie theatre was hurled a mile or two into the bay and the yachts were hurled out of the bay on to the streets of the town. On the south shore, Westhampton beach was a litter of shattered timber and upside-down cars.

This unnamed 1938 monster had winds of 186 miles an hour and rushed across Long Island Sound to leave the cities of New London, Connecticut and then Providence, Rhode Island, to leave them both awash with drowning cars and buses and their occupants. The big blow hurtled on into Canada, before it gave up the chase, but along the way it destroyed two-thirds of the state of New Hampshire's entire stand of white birch. By nightfall on that appalling day, 650 people were dead and close to two thousand injured.

The difference 47 years made was between a time when the Weather Bureau could report only what happened, not what might happen. Well, you'll have heard by now that Gloria moved very fast but came in blessedly at low tide, rushed across the Sound, hit the coast of Connecticut and slowed down and dissipated up in Massachusetts.

It was nothing like the storm of the century and old people who could remember, while not exactly shrugging it off, said that Gloria's performance failed to live up to the press releases. But they would have felt differently if there had been, today, no Miami Hurricane Center, no Dr Frank, no tracking of the thing from the Caribbean up, no organising of the federals and the state and local police and the rescue and evacuation teams, the food and water and medical supplies and all the rest of it for 35 million people.

I don't like to think what might have happened to the millions of the new residents of the south shores of New Jersey and Long Island and Connecticut if, last Friday morning, all they knew was a newspaper or radio weather forecast – 'rain and cooler'.

So, Saturday, the next day, as always, was a day of matchless, brilliant fall weather. Just over one million Long Island residents were without power through vast widespread tree damage and power lines looking like spiders' webs, and now, as I talk, something over 300,000 of us are still without power.

Life returns to the eighteenth century, except for paper towels with which you clean your plate. Go down to the bay and fetch up buckets of sea water to flush the lavatories, buy, borrow or steal kerosene. After three days, cook the unspoilt food on a wood fire, keep the mounting garbage sealed in the laundry yard. Throw out, then, several hundred dollars worth of now rotting food or burn it! No light, no water, no flushing, no baths.

And, after three or four days, the neighbours growling at the Long Island Lighting Company which, however, has brought in crews by truck from West Virginia, Pennsylvania and a thousand miles away from Michigan and Ohio. That these men would come from so far away and work in shifts through day and night is, in a decadent world, a heartening sign to me that the old, colonial tradition of neighbourliness is still there.

I'll tell you one thing. Next time I find myself at a candlelight supper, with the host's permission, I shall blow out all the candles and turn on Mr Edison's glorious gift – electric light.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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