Come and learn about the most devastating weather event ever to hit New England. Hurricane Irene did tremendous damage in 2011. Remember Irene’s flooding and add 100 mile per hour winds to it, and you’ll have a sense of Thirty-Eight.

I am working out the details for events in Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire, and I’ll post information on those when they become firm. Other events lined up include:

Yesterday was a big day. I was still basking in the glory of seeing my new book, Thirty-Eight: the Hurricane That Transformed New England for the first time, when I discovered that my basement was flooded.

In a largely snowless winter, instead we’ve been getting rain. Nearly an inch of rain fell overnight and couldn’t be absorbed by the frozen ground so it found a way into the basement. Freakish weather is becoming the norm for us. Very unsettling.

But imagine how unsettled you would have been on the afternoon and evening of September 21, 1938. A tremendous hurricane blasted into New England totally unannounced.

Unannounced, but more to the point, unthinkable. Not a single person living in New England had ever experienced a major hurricane before. Not even people on the coast. The Boston Globe the next day called it “New England’s first hurricane.”

How could this be? For generations the only tropical storm impact to New England had been late stage remnants of storms whose power had already been spent. People did not believe that hurricanes came this far north.

This one came farther north and farther inland than any in recorded history. Its track took it through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont before it fizzled out in Quebec and Ontario. En route, it uprooted forests in each of the New England states.

Weather events of this magnitude have immediate and lasting consequences. When the trees fell in these forests, people were there to hear them. And as a consequence, the forces of the New Deal—the CCC and the WPA under the supervision of the U.S. Forest Service—sprang into action. Because of a grave concern over the potential for fire, these agencies embarked on a cleanup operation, gathering and safely burning much of the brush. Meanwhile, the all-but-dead forest products industry geared up to salvage 2.8 billion board feet of logs, the equivalent of five years of harvest.

In this way, the region’s worst weather event was followed by the nation’s largest logging job. This ecological upheaval took place in the social and economic context of a nation struggling to emerge from the Great Depression while the drumbeats of war were beating more insistently. Ultimately, much of the salvaged lumber was used for shipping materiel in support of the war effort.

How this all came about is quite a story. Read about it in Thirty-Eight.

When word broke about Hurricane Alex forming in January 2016 near the Azores, I was shocked. How could the ocean still be warm enough this late (or early) in the season to support the formation of a tropical storm? It turns out that, while rare, this January appearance of a hurricane is not unprecedented. It has happened a handful of times in December. Only twice in the last 80 years has a Category 1 hurricane that was still churning in December held on into January. The last time, however, that a tropical disturbance organized itself into a hurricane in January was 1938. Yes, 1938, the year that the most destructive hurricane to ever hit New England blew through on September 21.

When researching for my book on that hurricane, Thirty-Eight, I was amused when I first heard someone say that hurricanes in New England are natural but exceedingly rare. How rare? Three times since Columbus landed in 1492 has a hurricane brought Category 1 winds (greater than 74 m.p.h.) into interior New England. The last time was in 1938, and it was both unforeseen and devastating. So yes, it’s perfectly natural but thankfully it doesn’t happen every year. Same with Hurricane Alex, this winter’s hurricane. Natural but rare. And we on the western shore of the Atlantic needn’t worry about seeing any of Alex. He’s expected to turn northward, run out of warm ocean, and become a memory.

I’ve gotten word from my publisher, Yale University Press, that my book Thirty-Eight: the Hurricane that Transformed New England, will be available on March 22. It will be available to bookstores in the weeks leading up to the official Pub Date. Needless to say, I’ll be thrilled to have it out in the world. I began my work on it in the fall of 2011, when I was awarded a Charles Bullard Fellowship at Harvard Forest. This was the perfect place to study the 1938 hurricane’s effects in southern New England because it blew down much of Harvard Forest’s magnificent pine forest. The experience of the people and the forest in central Massachusetts was quite different from what happened near my home town in Corinth, Vermont, and exploring the differences became the heart of the book.