Sea Control - Sea Control 312 - Rhode Island Hurricanes with Dr. Kara Schlichting

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

Links1. "Misremembering Risk in the Age of Hurricanes: The Rhode Island Coast in the 1930s-1950s," Dr. Kara Schlichting, Coastal Studies and Society, October 29, 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Dr. Kara Schlichting, and we'll be discussing a series of hurricanes that struck Rhode Island in the mid-20th century. This episode was edited and produced by Dr. Ed Salo. Speaking of audio editors, we're looking to add to our team, and if you're interested, please email us at ccontrol at simsec.org with your resume. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Village Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Ken Bruceman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, Shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Kara Schlichting,

and we're going to be discussing her article, Misremembering Risk in the Age of Hurricanes, the Rhode Island Coast in the 1930s to 1950s. So, Kara, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Would you mind introducing yourself to the audience, please? Absolutely. Thanks for the invitation. So I am an associate professor of history in New York City, and I teach at the City University of New York, which is part of the state of New York's public university network, and I'm out at Queens College in Flushing. And there I teach mostly urban history, actually, New York City and American cities, but my research is urban and environmental, and it's through urban waterfronts that I started to ask questions about the littlest state of the U.S., Rhode Island, and its waterfronts. So that's how I got here. It's been an unexpected research journey. well thank you and as a reminder all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated so let me ask are you from Rhode Island or how did you

come to the topic of New England hurricanes so my family is from Rhode Island my mother is a Rhode Islander and I in 2014 was really curious about this the language of coastal resiliency which was everywhere. So Superstorm Sandy hit New York City where I was living in late of 2012 and was really devastating for the city and the eastern seaboard, right? So Sandy was the most destructive and strongest hurricane of not just the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, but it was the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the second most expensive hurricane in New York city in U.S. history. And it was Barack Obama's administration was really interested in moving forward this question of how do we make our coastal cities and coastal communities more

resilient. And as an urban and environmental historian who had been researching the coastal transformations in the late 19th and early 20th century, I was immediately interested about this language of resiliency. And I thought, what would the environmental history of this concept look like the language is new in the 21st century but how could we go back in time and look at how people have asked how to make a coast safe or what makes a coast vulnerable in the past and so it was living through Hurricane Sandy and watching this national conversation about the threat of hurricanes in the 21st century that sent me back in time and Rhode Island was in part pragmatic and in part a New England survey. So I was living in New York at the time, and I wanted to look at eastern seaboard

communities and how they responded to hurricanes. And so I went to the places I could get. And so I went to Albany, the New York State Archives, and looked at their coastal zone management program archives, which is a 1970s program. And I started there to kind of work back in time. And then I went to Rhode Island because I had a place to sleep for free to go to the state archives. And I went to the state archives in Providence. And then I went to the University of Rhode Island, which has a big coastal studies and marine biology program. And I went to their archives. And I was working my way along the coast. The next two stops were Connecticut and New Jersey. But then in the way that academic courses unfold, I never got to those other

archives. And so I had thought I would see all of New England's kind of coastal landscape. And I ended up with two, and then I fell into a set of oral histories that actually was just plenty to think about, and that's how I ended up writing this history of 1930s through 1950s hurricane responses in Rhode Island, because URI had fabulous archives, and there was so much to dig into that I decided I spent kind of five years reading them and thinking about it. On the subject of oral histories, and this wasn't in the questions I gave you ahead of time, but do your parents or grandparents have any memories of sort of the events that you were covering here? So my family has lore about this. My grandparents had passed away on my mother's side by the time

I started this research, but my family is from Aquidneck Island, Newport, on the south side of the largest island in Narragansett Bay, which is kind of the most important feature of Rhode Island in terms of geography and we'll talk about that I think but my the story was that down by the beach my grandfather had been driving up and down in the 30s to get people who were stranded down as the water was coming and he had just bought a new car in the great depression and he was coming up and down the road because the big hill down to Easton's Beach First Beach in Newport Rhode Island and he had to leave the car it got waterlogged and he walked back up the hill and the car was wrecked storm surge pushed it into the reservoir. And the story was that the lady who ran the car shop

liked my grandpa Murphy, John Quinlan Murphy. And she said to him, when the depression's over, you can have the first car off the lot. That's a great story. So can you describe then Rhode Island's geography? Yeah. So Rhode Island, as I mentioned, is the littlest state in the United States. It is only 37 miles wide and 48 miles north to south. So east to west is 30, is 37. So you can kind of drive across it east to west in 45 minutes and just about an hour north to south. But it's not even as big as that because it's not a full landmass. Narragansett Bay takes up the eastern half and it's a kind of like a big shark bite out of Rhode Island. And it's 176 square miles. So I would argue that the state

is half water, just a little under half water. And because of that, the state has an enormous coastline. It has over 400 miles of coastline, which is mostly Narragansett Bay. There's just about 40 miles, which are Atlantic facing. So on the southwestern corner of the state, there are some big oceanfront sandy beaches. But most of the state's waterfront is facing the bay And so it has a different kind of lower tidal action and can be marshy and lots of estuaries. Your paper covers a series of severe storms that took place over a 16-year period, but it starts September 21st, 1938. What happened that day? Yeah, so the 38 hurricane is sometimes also known as the Long Island Express.

It catches New England unaware and is an incredibly deadly hurricane. Now, it could have been much worse because, as you know, it's the end of September. Rhode Island, in the 1930s, its shore communities are not as developed as long-term, four-season residential communities the way they are today. A lot of them are just seasonal communities. So the seasonal summer folks had already started to leave. They were mostly gone by the end of September. And so it could have been much deadlier, which is a wild thing to think about. But the storm is rolling up the Atlantic seaboard in late September, and the National Weather Service looks at it and says, this isn't going to be a big deal. And they decide not to issue a storm warning in advance or a hurricane warning. And so on the morning of this September day, the National Weather Service doesn't put out any warnings to people who are in low-lying or flood-prone areas. And so the storm is incredibly fast moving and it roars up the Atlantic seaboard and it hits Long Island first and then by hits Long Island, like just after afternoon, and then it gets to to Rhode Island around three in the afternoon, and it's almost. it's as if you would watch like a nature documentary sped up when you read about the oral histories that people can feel the barometer and the pressure in the air like they can feel

the barometric change like coming in real time and people talk about their ears popping and the sense of the pressure changing on their bodies and then like a time-lapse film that this the sky which was a blue it was a sunny blue day and warm at the end of september just turned this gray green almost in real time and it stopped people who were traveling in their days and they said whoa what is happening here and then the storm hit and it hits not just Rhode Island it hits Long Island which is kind of the first breaking point there it's the first time it makes landfall it skips across Long Island Sound and then the storm makes landfall again on the Connecticut shore and it roars its way up through New England so it's in it's at the Canadian border by the end of like

the end of the day, so just around midnight, which is a really fast-moving storm. And it just brings tidal surge and devastating winds, and it erases the coastal communities across both the bay and the Atlantic seashore of Rhode Island. So a lot of the barrier islands are wiped clean of habitation. Places that had big wooden, Victorian kind of wooden hotels are gone. Their foundations are gone. It cuts islands across some of the barrier islands. It cuts tidal straits with the force of the waves. It takes cars and hurls them off roads. It takes boats and hurls them onto land. And it just moves through and is almost a full erasure of many shore communities. Places are wiped out and gone. You mentioned the National Weather Service opting not to put out a warning.

Maybe you know the answer to this. If you don't know the answer, that's fine. Just say so, and we'll cut this part out. But how would they have issued that warning then? Would that have even made an impact on the people then? Because I can't imagine, you know, there were no 24-hour weather channels at that point. No ways for quick communication beyond, I think, probably radio. Correct.

But so the oral histories that I have, Rhode Island had a very large naval presence during the 30s actually through the 1960s it has a number of military installations and there are oral histories from the URI's collection that talks about that the people who worked on naval bases in particular were frustrated because they would have had that it would have been part of the defense system for these bases they would have known and they couldn't they and they say a motto says in his oral history even the naval base doesn't know and we could have done something because that would have been part of our defense protections for the Navy because of the installation on the harbor. And so perhaps not everyone would have heard across the radio, but there's awareness

that the government at least would have been able to respond at least in a half measure. So why was the state so unprepared then? We've talked about the National Weather Service, but why the state not see any of this coming? What we find out later, and it's the Army Corps of engineers who finds this out, and we'll talk about that. And that's kind of the heart of my research is there had been no strong hurricane in the 20th century in Rhode Island. The last kind of strong storms had hit a generation and a half earlier. And so the oral histories are full of people saying there is no such thing as a New England hurricane. And so Rhode Islanders are the generation of people who are living in Rhode Island in the 1930s, no one has lived through

a storm this damaging or this deadly. And there's a sense that hurricanes are something that happen elsewhere in America. They happen on the Gulf and they happen in the south, the kind of southern Atlantic seashore. So Florida, Georgia, coastline. They have lived, Rhode Islanders have lived with nor'easters and strong winter storms. And so they know that storms are damaging, but they do not believe there's a New England hurricane exists. And part of that narrative has left Rhode Islanders unprepared for the fact that a hurricane could come or to look for warnings or to have built their communities in a way that they could respond quickly or to protect infrastructure. And so the fact that there had not been one, been a storm like this in enough time to keep people looking for it is part of the problem. And in the oral histories, and I write about it in the article, one young woman who lives in Providence, her father is from Florida, and he's looking at the weather as it changes.

and he says, this is a hurricane. She says, don't, don't be silly, father. We don't have hurricanes here. But he was right. The man with the memory who had lived through a hurricane looked outside and saw it coming. But most of Rhode Island didn't have that experience to draw on. I think this next question is going to get us to that. In 1954, three more hurricanes hit the Northeast and he wrote, quote, the destructive storms of 1954 forced Americans to build a new social memory of New England hurricanes, end quote. What does that mean? And so social memory is a term that comes out of geography, and geographers who work to think about how ideas of landscape and risk are built into communities. And so I've been

reading about how memory works with natural disasters, and natural disaster history is very much attuned to these questions in geography. There's a lot of interdisciplinary overlap. And the idea comes from sociology and geography who think about how communities remember traumatic past. And that community memory is a way of, a community memory means that communities have lived through an experience, let's say a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake, and then they keep those memories alive in the actions they take after. And so whether it's putting up a memorial in a downtown, it's marking flood heights along a wall, it's moving where homes and infrastructure are built. But if a community responds to the hurricane or the disaster in the

past and they change policy and practice and they tell stories about that history, then it's a way that keeps a robust social memory but that doesn't that is not a guaranteed response to to a disaster and that can be anything like a community can keep a memory of a of a of anything from a hurricane but also to questions of trauma of say battlefields and military history that happens across communities or to genocide and so community memory can be everything about memorializing the holocaust in eastern europe to thinking about an earthquake in california but there are these questions of how our community maintains uh stories of the past and how they build it into modern practice i'm gonna go a little bit out of sequence here uh because i

think this next question probably fits a little bit better uh you had mentioned memorializing sort of human tragedy whether it's um well you mentioned battlefields which americans are very good at recognizing those type of events memorializing them and thinking about them every single year why is it so difficult to maintain social memory of the consequence of environmental events and this is a this is a great question that environmental humanity scholars and environmental historians have have been thinking about in part part of the problem historians have written is that something like a hurricane is in essence a moment of erasure how do you memorialize something that is ephemeral right a wave that there's tidal surge doesn't stay a battlefield

will continue to be in place a tidal surge comes and goes and then with with its leaving it creates it erases what had been on the coast and so the question says how do you memorialize something that is ephemeral in nature and takes away kind of the markers that might be left that takes that the ruin there aren't even any ruins to build commemoration around so those are two of the questions that are often associated with why storms in particular are hard to memorialize and build into kind of government or community responses moving forward so what sort of work was the army corps of engineer overseeing in coastal communities in this area? So the Army Corps of Engineers has a really fascinating history in the 1930s.

Traditionally, the Corps in New England has been focused on coastal navigation, protecting navigation channels in important ports. So in my research on New York City, for example, the Army Corps is instrumental in regulating what is dumped in the harbor to make sure there isn't siltation in navigation channels so that navigation channels remain deep or perhaps they need to be expanded. The Army Corps does that type of work. They improve navigation. They also control pier lines and how far out you can build into a navigable waterway. And that's typical across important commercial ports across the nation. But in the 1930s, the Army Corps begins to look at beach erosion. And it's inspired to do that by New England adjacent state, by New Jersey,

that the state of New Jersey had started to look into what was happening to its beaches early in the 20th century. What they're going to discover in this era is what we now know of as littoral drift, that beaches are dynamic landscapes that are constantly growing and receding and moving. But New Jersey is interested in this because they have a coastal tourism. And so the economics of the state are interested in understanding this, the science of coastal spaces. And so the Army Corps starts to get involved in this, and it actually becomes really important in the following decade, in the 40s, because the Army Corps takes this knowledge from beach erosion that they've started to work with the state of New Jersey, and they take it abroad

in the Second World War. And these beach erosion specialists are actually in Normandy and in France because it is very important to understand how beaches work in the European theater. And so then they come back to the United States and they're growing the type of research they do after the Second World War. And this storm in 38 and then the three hurricanes in 54 are a moment of energize. They energize the core to continue to broaden the type of research it does along shore in New England. And there's a lot of congressional push after the 54 storms to invest in hurricane studies and hurricane preparedness in New England. And so that's how the Corps is starting to grow its research. They had already been working on Narragansett Bay and in Rhode Island, Providence, which is the capital of Rhode Island, and it sits at the very top of Narragansett Bay.

And so storm surge protection has been of great interest to the Corps there. So they've been studying jetties and hard structures to be harbor protections. The storm makes them zoom out in their perspective, the core researchers, and start to look at all different types of things. The 30s and 40s and 50s is when the core also starts to do cost-benefit analysis for the first time to try to understand what it means to have economic damage and protect it in the future. And so all of these questions are starting to grow, and Rhode Island is fascinating because

the core does these really comprehensive studies. They look at coastal land use. They look at coastal businesses. They go door to door and knock on businesses and say, how much did you lose in 54? What does it cost you? What do you need for protections? They look at the marine biology of the bay and the fisheries that are part of the bay, the lobstermen as well. They say, what do you need? What do storms do to you? How can we help protect your businesses? And then they look at coastal real estate and they try to figure out what is a way to protect real estate investments on the bay. And so it's this moment where they start to zoom out and think in a really comprehensive way about economy as well as ecology and topography. And then they also start to look to the past. And they do what I would say is a historian's project. They go and run through archival records of New England, and they look for every example of someone speaking about a storm that is severe, and they create, they rebuild a chronology of past storms, and they go back to the 1600s, to the earliest European records. Can you describe then what they learned as they dug into the history and the hydrography of Narragansett Bay?

so and i should say they're also studying in these past storms they're studying at this moment the core and the national weather bureau are also studying how hurricanes work and so there's a there's lots of really great new research happening they're starting to put you know coming out of florida they're putting those storm chasers they're trying to fly into the eyes of hurricanes to record data about wind speed and how hurricanes move up the atlantic coast so I don't want to I don't want to ignore this the scientists down in Florida and so what they discover are a couple of important things they discover there's always been new there's no such thing as a hurricane for New England there have always been newer England hurricanes they go all

the way back to William Bradford in Massachusetts Bay Colony and his diary where he writes about storms and then he writes about the Wampanoags who are one of the Native American tribes in the greater Rhode Island area today who have who say oh yeah they tell William Bradford like oh this happens if we know that these storms come through so they can go all the way back to pre-European arrival to find oral stories oral histories of these storms so they realize there's always been a hurricane potential in New England and they realize that it's cyclical and they've just been at the end of a long dry spell but that they're going to come back the next thing they discover in studying the way hurricanes move up the Atlantic coast

is not only does Rhode Island have hurricanes as part of its weather, it actually sits in the most damaging corner of an Atlantic hurricane. If you think about the way a hurricane moves as a clock, the hurricane as a clock, two o'clock on that clock is actually the strongest wind in a hurricane

as it cycles up the Atlantic seaboard. And hurricanes are most likely to make landfall in New England. and the Corps discovers this in this research after 54, they're most likely to make landfall in a way across the Connecticut-Rhode Island border that puts that strongest weather directly over Rhode Island. And then they realize that Narragansett Bay, its shape is like a funnel or kind of like a bell, exacerbates the strongest weather of an Atlantic hurricane. And they discover this through the research they do in the 50s. And so not only are there New England

hurricanes, not only does Rhode Island sit in the most damaging path of these hurricanes, Rhode Island's geography and the topography of the bay make them more deadly in Rhode Island, or potentially more deadly and potentially more damaging, because it creates a funnel that just rockets tidal surge up into Providence, which we know is the capital. And so Providence is just like three different challenges of extreme impact on Rhode Island and then of course the state capital sits at the at the center of that target. One of the most interesting things I have found in your paper there was you had a picture of a gigantic scale model that the Army Corps had actually built down in Vicksburg to model the entirety of Narragansett Bay as well as what

would it there there was a way for them to impart force onto the model to actually watch some of this occur and uh i don't know if that thing still exists or not but uh the army corps makes a number of really fascinating models in this era they also model the chesapeake bay and there are historians who are i can send you the link there are historians who are doing great work and ask questions about what the the modeling and the science um that the army corps applies to the chesapeake bay model because it's this huge concrete model in an aircraft uh hangar and they can stimulate tidal surges. And so they practice with the model of what a normal tide looks like moving through Narragansett Bay. And then they start to create test models for what it looks

like for different types of hurricanes and how floods could move across the Rhode Island and Narragansett Bay's seashore or bay shore. So what was then the core solution to the problem of hurricanes and storm surge in Rhode Island? You mentioned some of these before, but you can go into a little bit more detail. This is the kind of prototypical core response at mid-20th century. It's hard structures, hard protective structures, and that is through the proposal of hurricane barriers. They proposed what would be the most ambitious hurricane barriers network up to this moment so there had there was nothing that they'd ever built as that was as large and comprehensive as what they proposed to build for Rhode Island

they proposed three hurricane barriers across the mouth of Narragansett Bay and there were three of them necessary because Narragansett Bay has a number of islands Jamestown and Aquidneck Island being the largest and so there's basically three entrances to the bay scattered between the mainland and these islands. So they need one for each. And then they propose an additional hurricane barrier at Fox Point in Providence to protect the downtown, because Providence is inundated in 38 and again in 54. They're not built, the lower bay barriers. So in some ways, while the hard structures for these hurricane gates, basically, that you'd be able to close off Narragansett Bay when a hurricane was coming, you'd be able to turn the bay into a pond. They're never built.

It is an enormous project because of the depth of Narragansett Bay. Narragansett Bay has long been a place of trade, and the Navy is there because it's such a deep water port. And so a deep water port is hard to close off from the Atlantic Ocean. These gates have to be really deep to be effective. And the project is astronomical in cost and in scale, and they don't build those lower bay barriers. So that's unusual. The Army Corps is very good at building hard protective structures at mid-century. It's kind of the peak of hard protective structures. They do build the one in Providence. And these structures are often the point of critique that when the historians and policymakers are looking to critique the Corps, which is often a low-hanging fruit in the

way the Corps responds to coastal risk, they say that this is kind of hubris, that you can create a physical static structure that will protect coastal land use in an environment that is naturally dynamic. The coast is not static as an environment. Why would you think that a static structure would be effective long-term? And of course, the unintended consequences of these hardening structures can often exacerbate the problems. Something built to prevent erosion can actually exacerbate erosion either in that locale or down the coast because of the process of littoral drift. And so in some ways it's a perfect encapsulation of what the core is up to and in some ways it's surprising that the structures aren't built because there's a lot of

there's a lot of support for these types of structures at that era. The region suffered another hurricane in 1965, Betsy, and what was the federal response to that storm? How did the federal response change in the late 60s and early 70s? Yes, Betsy is our introduction to the National Flood Insurance Program. I think if people are going to know about one hurricane in North American history, Betsy is the one to keep in the back of our minds. And so Betsy is the nation's first billion-dollar hurricane, meaning it causes a billion dollars worth of damage. And in 1968, so the storm is in 65, and in 68, Congress creates the National Flood Insurance Program, which is intended to offer low-cost insurance to property owners in risky coastal communities.

But it's also supposed to reduce federal disaster and flood control spending, and it's supposed to, in its design, discourage development in flood hazard zones. And so if I say that I think Betsy is the hurricane we need to know about, because of the National Flood Insurance Program, it has had really significant ramifications on the way people develop at the American coastline. because the program doesn't reign in coastal development, in flood zones, and doesn't necessarily change building codes and land use regulations. Those codes and regulations are basically unimplemented. What it does is it subsidizes flood insurance at a lower risk than private insurance would charge a coastal property owner. And so it actually makes it, it actually encourages coastal development. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Kara Schlichting. Kara, where can we find

you online, and what are you working on next? I'm online. I'm over with all the historians sharing history facts on Twitter, and it's not a bad corner of Twitter, actually, and I am writing right now. I have a little bit more about coastal research. I've got one more piece coming out about coastal beaches and sea level rise in Malibu, California. That will be out 2023 in Pacific Historical Review. So it's the other case study I pulled out of this coastal resiliency research. And then I'm around mostly doing urban environmental history. But once in a while, I'll hop back into the coastal studies because I just can't quit it. I really appreciate that. I look forward to reading some of your other projects too. Maybe

we can talk about those. But thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon