Hazel's Fling

Starting in the eastern Caribbean, Hurricane Hazel pottered harmlessly over the water for an entire week, poking tentatively westward, turning leisurely to the north. Then Hazel hit Haiti. Like many another lady tourist in that exotic land, Hazel went wild.

The storm smacked the tip end of Haiti's long, southern peninsula, neatly avoiding its mountain barriers, and danced disastrously across some of the island's most heavily populated areas. At Dame-Marie, floods and high winds killed 40; the towns of Jeremie and Aux Cayes were largely unroofed. The International Red Cross estimated that too people were dead and 100,000 homeless after the storm's brief passage. But Haiti foresaw as the storm's worst effect months of starvation for remote, hand-to-mouth villagers, whose subsistence crops of bananas and plantains were ruined.

Wind & Flame. The following day Hazel made her crashing entrance into the U.S., ripping at fishing piers and crumpling bungalows along the Carolina coast. Eighty big Navy vessels fled to sea from Norfolk, Va., while military planes scrambled for safe airports as far away as Kansas. In Washington the General Services Administration, prudent and economical, ordered flags hauled down from most federal buildings; one left up on the Capitol was whipped to shreds. Chicken houses in rural Maryland collapsed by the hundreds, and incubator stoves set the wreckage on fire. The windy night was rosy with flame, and terrified, liberated hens flapped through the fields.

Rain & Flood. The Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio Rivers went over their banks as the storm made an evening passage, northbound, through central Pennsylvania. In and near Wheeling, W. Va., a city of 58,000 built partly on an island in the Ohio, 2,400 families had to leave their homes while others moved furniture to upper floors and waited it out. Inevitably, in upstate New York, the hurricane blew down a theater marquee with signs reading, GONE WITH THE WIND. Felling trees, collapsing roofs and downing wires, the winds brought death to 82 persons and wrecked more than half a billion dollars' worth of crops and property in the U.S. President Eisenhower, holding an emergency meeting in the White House after returning from Sunday church services, heard pleas for help from North and South Carolina, declared a "major disaster" in those areas, and offered immediate and unlimited federal assistance.

In Canada the hurricane brought solid walls of rain; Toronto, with 7.2 in. in a day, doubled all previous rainfall records. Rowboats, helicopters and even a fire truck (its ladders thrust far over the water) rescued many from the rooftop-dotted waters of the Humber and Don Rivers. But the drowned and killed totaled at least 66, and damage in Ontario was estimated at $100 million. By the time cold currents over Hudson Bay finally put an ice pack on Tourist Hazel, the eighth hurricane of the season had blown up into the year's worst, and the autumn storm season itself was the worst in a decade.

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