Hurricanes: Hermine, 1944, and the price of progress

Waves up to 25 feet high crashed on the Atlantic City surf, smashing the world's most famous promenade into perilous chunks of debris that rammed into downtown buildings.

It was on this date in 1944 that a powerful hurricane roared up the East Coast at 40 m.p.h., killing over 300 people aboard military vessels.

The storm was blamed for at least 10 deaths in New Jersey. It took out  60 percent of the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and caused devastation in Sea Isle City, Strathmere, Cape May, and Wildwood.

The storm didn't make landfall in Jersey; the destruction came from waves churned by a potent cyclone agitating the ocean like a massive plunger. One hypothesis even holds that the damage was result of a rare tsunami.

The hurricane destruction remains unmatched in New Jersey history – remember, Sandy technically wasn't a hurricane – despite any number of scares in subsequent years.

The most recent, of course, involved Hermine, the subject of a week-long watch-and-wait drama. At one point it appeared poised to make a direct hit on the Jersey Shore.

In the end, it was largely a fish storm, and the wayward track projections raised some howls of protest.

Such is the price of progress. It might not be much consolation for those who had Labor Day plans washed out by forecasts, but Hermine was a reminder that if a 1944-caliber hurricane came along, we sure would know it.

It's not that the '44 storm was poorly predicted, based on accounts in the government's Monthly Weather Review and in the source of source, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A front-page item in the Sept. 13, 1944, Inquirer, assuredly written the night of the 12^th, talked of a stalled storm off Florida that had the potential to come up the coast.

The Page 1 article on the 14^th – again, written the night before – told of "storm warnings … north of the Virginia Capes to Altantic City. A hurricane alert was extended northward to Eastport, Maine."

What those folks didn't have back then were suites of computer models that could portray various scenarios to scare the daylights out of us several days in advance.

Nor did they have 900 cable channels, nor the internet, nor the jolts of smartphone alerts.

In the United States these days, it is almost impossible to escape weather information, and any credible storm threat is going to elicit saturation coverage, whether you want it or not.

We will mention one other major difference between 1944 and today. The '44 storm was anonymous; the naming system didn't begin until the 1950s.

And for whatever reasons, names command attention, and no doubt add to the drama.

The relentless coverage of a hurricane threat can be tiresome, if not annoying, but in 2016, at least we'll see it coming.