A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes

摘要

On the evening of Monday, August 30, 1954, the residents of Boston, Massachusetts, and its surrounding communities slept with the confidence that a slow-moving hurricane in the mid-Atlantic region would turn seaward at Cape Hatteras. A few days earlier, the storm had begun intensifying off Jacksonville, Florida, and was moving at a stately crawl of 100 miles per day. As New England slept that night, the storm accelerated and took a more northerly heading, reaching Long Island, New York, in just 12 hours. The Boston Weather Bureau duly issued a regionwide gale warning at 6 a.m. on August 31, while most area residents were still asleep. By the time that warning was upgraded to a hurricane, the storm was just 120 miles from the coastal town of Marblehead on the Massachusetts North Shore.