This article describes some of the details experienced by a few people in my home state in mid-October, 1954, during Hurricane Hazel. I was 12 years old, living in Raleigh, NC, approximately 110 miles as the crow flies from the town of Shallotte mentioned in the article. The hurricane hit Raleigh in mid morning. We kids had gone to school not thinking that such a storm would reach us. I was in 6th grade in a school on a street that carried US1 traffic through our town. At about 11:00 AM, the school system had better news of the storm than they did when the school bell rang. In those days, almost every child lived within easy walking distance of school. We were released and told to go home. I ran the 3 blocks to my house just as the first wind gusts starting tearing limbs from trees. No children were injured by the school board's decision to send them home, but it had never happened before and hasn't happened since. I think the school superintendent was worried about liability if students were injured in a storm at school. There was so much hue and cry about the release - particularly the timing of the release - of the kids that the school board took decision making authority away from the superintendent's office.
About 2 weeks later, my dad and my brother-in-law and I drove to the NC coast to view the destruction. A 6-story brick construction hotel was washed over by the storm surge. Ironically is was an iconic seaside hotel named "The Breakers." You can imagine what damage was done to smaller structures. I saw Shallotte, Carolina Beach and Wrightsville Beach on that late October weekend. The memory has never left me, nor will it as long as I draw breath. The amazing part of this story is that so few people were killed in North Carolina as the storm ground its way with wind and rain in about a 50 mile wide swath through the state from South to North.
Many, many trees were blown down including a centuries old oak tree next to my mom's sister's house. It was approximately 5 feet in diameter in my memory. A few limbs were blown away, but most of the tree remained intact. It fell because the amount of rainfall so saturated the red clay soil that the root system broke away and pulled up the a 10' diameter root ball. The winds of ~100mph created the force. I remember dozens of other similar trees down around the city. One would think that they would mostly all fall pointed in the direction of the path of the storm, but that was not the case. They fell pointing in all directions of the compass. On our trip to the coast, we saw thousands of trees, large and small, that fell in the same direction. Just East of Raleigh the soil turns from piedmont red clay to sandy, coastal plain loam. One could see the remains of some of the largest trees 2 decades later. As a 12-year-old, I made a lot of extra money over the next months clearing debris from yards and sawing and hauling wood. That oak tree from my aunt's house gave us enough firewood to heat the house for a winter and a half after it was cut, stacked and seasoned, and we never were able to cut through the main bole of the trunk with an 8' misery whip.
I hope I haven't bored you with my recollections. When I read the article linked at the top of this post, it brought back memories of sight, sound, smell, taste and the pelting rain at the edge of the storm.
