Niagara Gazette
COLUMN BY BILL BRADBERRY —
I cannot directly recall much about that year, but as I look back at it, 1954 was a year to remember for a lot of different reasons with Hurricane Hazel, and the lessons we should have learned from her, among them.
From what I have discovered, 1954 was, for the most part a good year, considering.
The 1954 World Series matched the National League champion New York Giants against the American League champion Cleveland Indians. Unfortunately for my dad, an avid Cleveland and Larry Doby fan, the Giants swept the Series in four games to win their first championship since 1933, defeating the heavily favored Indians, who had won an American League record 111 games in the regular season.
That Series is best remembered by many for “The Catch,” an amazing running catch made by Giants center fielder Willie Mays in Game 1, snagging a long drive by Vic Wertz near the outfield wall with his back to the infield in full color for the first time on network television.
I can still hear my dad hissing about that one, but other than that, in our household and across America, life was basically looking up for most.
Moms were humming Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There,” while a new song by the Crew Cuts, “SH-Boom,” and Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” were blasting from portable radios.
The Supreme Court had handed down a landmark case, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka declaring that state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities were unconstitutional, thus paving the way for the civil rights movement.
People had jobs. They were buying houses, cars, color televisions ...
And just about everybody who could get in front of a television did so to enjoy the vision of what life in America was supposed to look like. Shows like “Father Knows Best,” Make Room for Daddy,” “Dragnet,” “Lassie” and the U.S Steel Hour defined us.
Then one day in mid-October something changed. It was the weather.
“We’re going to get hit by the tail end of the storm,” I vividly recall my mother saying. I was 6 years old and did not know what she meant, but I could sense by the tension and the thick humidity in the air that something serious was happening and whatever it was, it was not good.
Mom was worried.
First spotted east of the Windward Islands on Oct. 5, 1954, Hazel danced across the islands later that day as a hurricane before she headed westward over the southern Caribbean through Oct. 8.
Slowly she turned, inch by inch, mile by mile to the north-northeast crossing western Haiti as a hurricane on Oct. 12 and leaving a path of death and destruction before she turned north and accelerated on Oct. 15, making landfall as a devastating Category 4 storm near the North Carolina-South Carolina border with wind gusts estimated at 130 to 150 mph along the coast between Myrtle Beach and Cape Fear, N.C..
By the time she reached Washington, D.C., 78 mph sustained winds were wreaking havoc. Hazel was headed straight for us and Canada, combining with another weather system to bring nearly a foot of rain as far northward as Toronto where one neighborhood suffered immense losses as one anonymous writer put it, “Bryan Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter who was at the scene, later recounted the awesome sight of the neighborhood being torn apart.”
He wrote, “It was like something out of a Cecil B. DeMille movie ... the incredible roar of the water, like the roar of Niagara Falls. It was a gigantic flood with smashed houses and uprooted trees bobbing like corks, everything going down the river so fast; houses crashing into the sides of other houses, people everywhere screaming. And then you couldn’t even hear the screams anymore.”
The writer continues, “The next morning sunlight revealed the extent of the damage. The area of Raymore Drive that was destroyed was swept clean of all houses, trees, grass and dirt. In all, 35 people died in this football field-sized piece of land and 14 houses were destroyed. Many of the bodies were never recovered and are assumed to have been washed miles down into Lake Ontario. In all, between 81 and 83 people died that night in Canada as a direct result of Hurricane Hazel, with Raymore Drive having by far the highest concentration of fatalities.”
Another author, Betty Kennedy, details Hurricane Hazel stories of entire families who were stranded on their rooftops, calling for help that couldn’t reach them, being swept away right before the eyes of terrified would-be rescuers.
There were no satellites, no weather channels, and no Internet to warn anyone of what was coming. We were still three years away from Sputnik, the Soviet cold war satellite that changed the world for all the wrong reasons.
Without sufficient warning and flood controls, communities along Canada’s Humber River that were located in its floodplain were devastated: At Woodbridge, the river swelled from its usual width of 66 feet to 351 feet at its narrowest point. The damage was so severe that the area along Raymore Drive and the surrounding neighborhood was converted from a residential area into a park.
Some communities learned; some have not yet.
In all, Hazel killed more than 1,200 people and did more than $10 billion in damage in today’s dollars.
I have no memory or records of any significant Hazel related destruction here other than some relatively minor flooding, but the lessons to be learned and appreciated from Hazel, Katrina, Earl and others are that Mother Nature is bigger than all of us, that she is everywhere all the time, and that she deserves to be respected at all costs.
Contact Bill Braberry at bill.bradberry@yahoo.com.
