Sudden Sea-The Great Hurricane of 1938

This book was given to me by a coworker at the Archives. She told me many of the stories and I was intrigued by what had happened, especially because I had never heard about any hurricane being up in the New England area.  The author was R.A. Scotti and he told various stories beginning with the weather bureau in Florida who did a great job of preparing them for this momentous storm only to have it change directions and leave only a little bad weather behind. The problem was that the storm did change directions but it ended up crashing into all the coast line and inland in the northeast.  The ways people survived was amazing.  At the end of the storm over 600 people had perished and over 2 billion trees were ripped out of the ground.  They said it took over 5 years to cut and prepare the trees that were destroyed during the storm.  When the storm finally passed there were hardly any buildings standing and the surveyors had to redraw the maps of the islands all around that area because they had changed so much.  One of the stories in the book was about some people who had come together and kept climbing higher and higher in the house until they were up in the attic.  A man there told everyone that there was nothing else they could do but pray.  One of the little girls said the only prayer she knew was "Now I lay me down to sleep...."  That would not have been a very comforting prayer to me and it made me grateful that we know how to pray to our Heavenly Father when we have specific needs.  This is a very interesting book and would certainly be worth reading if you are looking for a good history book.