I’m not sure what context American writer Melissa Febos was referencing when I came across the above quote recently, but it certainly fit the bill for the subject of this week’s column.
Early in July I was honoured to attend a dedication ceremony and historical presentation that memorialized two Palmerston railway men killed in a 1954 derailment in Southampton. Perhaps you even read about that presentation in last week’s issue.
One of those men had a direct family connection on my wife’s side; William Stewart Nicholson was my father-in-law’s father, a man he himself never got the chance to meet after he was born three weeks after his death.
Nicholson was one of 81 lives lost in Ontario that October as a direct result of the inland destruction caused by Hurricane Hazel. A Category 4 storm, Hazel killed approximately 1,000 people throughout the Caribbean, along the U.S.’s eastern seaboard and in southern Ontario over a two-week period. Her primary weapon was heavy rains and high winds, causing unprecedented flooding in areas that had never come close to encountering that level of devastation before.
As I’ve previously written, I’ve had a longstanding fascination with extreme weather events – most notably tornadoes – but had never really delved much into the hurricane realm before the Palmerston presentation I attended on July 2. Everyone around my age has very likely heard of Hugo, Andrew and Katrina, but what was historically the worst Atlantic storm ever recorded?
I suppose you have to first consider what your definition of ‘worst’ is, and most often the most cut and dry way is measuring the loss of life involved. Overall destruction, inhabitant displacement and damage costs are also factored in during more modern analysis, if the details are available. After consulting a number of different websites, it would appear that no other storm directly compared to one particular Atlantic event that occurred nearly 250 years ago.
The Great Hurricane of 1780 is known by many names that vary depending on where it is sourced. Huracán San Calixto or the Great Hurricane of the Antilles are also options. Some just call it the 1780 Disaster. Whatever handle you want to assign it, this maxed-out Category 5 hurricane was no doubt biblical in nature for the poor souls who experienced it firsthand.
Off the hop it should be stated that this storm obviously predated modern meteorological-monitoring statistics, so its complete scale will never be known. Eyewitness accounts are also spotty because of the lack of descriptive records from the era, but the death toll is largely agreed upon to have been approximately 25,000 lives lost over a 10-day period that October. To put it in context, North Perth’s entire population is 15,538 according to the 2021 Census.
The Lesser Antilles is a group of Caribbean islands located east of Cuba, and the Great Hurricane of 1780 hit areas like Barbados, Martinique and Saint Lucia particularly hard. A historical account from one observer reported that the storm stripped the bark off trees of one island, leading modern-day meteorologists to speculate that wind speeds would have had to top 320 km/h (200 miles per hour) to cause that level of damage. Almost unimaginable.
Construction and infrastructure of the day no doubt played a role in the high casualty rate. Inhabitants of these islands two and half centuries ago would have had nowhere to go and few options in terms of relative safety. Additionally, French and British warships were having regular sparring matches as part of the extended U.S. Revolutionary War during this period; the British naval presence in this area was all but obliterated by the storm.
When comparing some of the other top ‘storms of the century’ to that of the 1780 event, Hurricane Mitch fixated itself over Honduras in 1998, with its torrential rains causing mudslides and flooding that killed approximately 11,000 people. The United States’ deadliest on record was the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 – it killed upwards of 12,000 people primarily in eastern Texas.
The Great Hurricane of 1780 astoundingly inflicted the same loss of life of both those two devastating events combined. Let’s hope we never see another Atlantic storm that comes close to its wrath.
Unconcerned with human frailty, indeed.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here in a fortnight.
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This is a bi-weekly opinion column; for question or comment contact Dan McNee at dmcnee@midwesternnewspapers.com.
