This week in 1938, the most destructive storm in Suffolk County’s history struck without warning. The “Long Island Express” roared ashore at Westhampton Beach with winds topping 100 miles per hour and a storm surge that obliterated miles of coastline. On this anniversary, the stories of those who lived through it remind us of both the hurricane’s devastation and the vulnerability of South Shore communities.
The storm came in fast. By early afternoon on September 21, the ocean had surged across the barrier island, cutting seven new inlets from Cupsogue to Quogue and sweeping away the Moriches and Potunk Coast Guard stations. The West Bay Bathing Beach and Quantuck Beach Club were smashed to pieces, while 179 dune houses vanished in hours. Main Street in Westhampton Beach became a river six feet deep. At the Six Corners School, 200 children escaped with their lives only because classes had been dismissed minutes before waves crashed against its doors.
For those caught in the storm, survival hinged on courage and sheer chance. Norman Hubbard watched in horror as residents were stranded on the far side of the Beach Lane Bridge, water rising swiftly around them. As he made his way toward the bridge, he saw the Surf and Dune Club—a large house east of West Bay, once a private home but then operated as a beach hotel by Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. The couple and their staff were on the front porch, trapped. “Mr. Lewis waved to the others and jumped into the water,” Hubbard recounted. “That house, with mammoth fireplaces and chimneys, was washed completely away.” The Lewises and their guests drowned, their bodies later recovered in the village wreckage.
Hubbard himself pressed on to the bridge, hoping to reach his car, which had been blown into the bay by the hurricane-force winds. As the storm intensified, he noted the bay’s water had been drawn away by the storm’s suction, leaving shallow mudflats just west of the bridge. When the wind shifted to the southwest, the full force of the hurricane hit, with gusts exceeding 100 miles per hour. Clinging to the bridge railing, Hubbard met Leslie Jessup, the bridge tender, and urged him to leave the house before it collapsed. Jessup refused, saying, “No, I can’t swim!” With water rising by the minute, Hubbard held on for his life as the chaos of West Bay unfolded around him.
Hubbard held on as waves hurled houses, roofs, and even a canoe against the structure. “People and animals were clinging to their roofs. It was shocking to see this,” he recalled. At the height of the storm, the water came within a foot of overtopping the bridge. “Day turned into night,” he said, “then the eye passed over, and we could look up and see the sun.” When the storm resumed with renewed fury, Hubbard crawled on his knees toward the canoe, only to watch it snatched away by the wind. Hours later, drenched and exhausted, he staggered from the wrecked bridge into a village littered with bodies and debris.
James McFarland, a young man then, ventured out with his brother-in-law once the winds eased, only to find Main Street underwater and the dunes gone. “We agreed that everyone, including our relatives, must be gone, and there was nothing we could do,” he recalled. That night, as he prayed for word of his missing father and brothers, the radio carried grim reports: twenty confirmed dead and many more missing.
At dawn, McFarland was given a seat in a small plane to help search the wreckage. “As we flew over Moriches Bay, we saw a truck with the van body gone. We didn’t see my father’s Packard taxi. When the pilot made a loop, that meant a body was found below. We saw two bodies.” After the plane landed at Chapman’s Garage in East Moriches, McFarland walked home, where he found his father and brothers alive. They had survived by swimming between collapsing houses and taking refuge in the sturdy “Eight Bells” home, one of the few left standing.
Even those inland were not spared. Ria Del Bene watched from Main Street as the Moniebogue Canal suddenly emptied, unaware that a tidal wave was about to hit. “The water started coming up over the meadows, so I ran home. We watched the wind lift a hundred-year-old wild cherry tree, pull it up roots and all, and lay it on the ground like a bouquet,” Bene said. When calls went out for volunteers, her brother answered—only to find he was recovering bodies, not rescuing the living. At the Westhampton Country Club, which became a makeshift morgue, families identified neighbors and friends who had refused to leave their homes.
For Wilson Fiske Reynolds, later mayor of Westhampton Beach, the storm was marked by close calls and chance survival. Driving on Dune Road that morning, he became the last man to pass over what would become Shinnecock Inlet, created that day by the ocean’s surge. Later, when a neighbor begged for help rescuing her baby, Reynolds swam through four feet of water to the Stevens Lane house, where he found the infant and caretaker safe, a sloop tied at the ready in case they had to flee.
By nightfall, Reynolds was in a small boat, clearing wreckage from the bay to reach Dune Road. “I lay on the bow, shoving aside fragments of houses and furniture,” he recalled. “Of 179 houses between Moriches Inlet and Quogue, only a few were left in recognizable condition.”
Working at the Westhampton Beach Post Office that day, Phebe Havens Tuttle had her own brush with danger. Driving home through downed wires and trees, she found her family safe, but her sister and brother-in-law nearly drowned when a wall of ocean water burst through their Main Street gift shop, sweeping displays into the street. “Somehow, they made it up to my house, carrying their dog, drenched and hysterical,” she said. At her parents’ Library Avenue home, a runaway boat smashed into the kitchen door, one more fragment of the chaos that left the neighborhood in ruins.
In Quogue, the devastation was equally severe. The storm carved a 400-foot-wide breach through the barrier beach, swept away the Quantuck Beach Club, and pushed floodwaters nearly a mile north, destroying railroad tracks, roads, and even lifting the Church of the Atonement from its foundation. Rescue efforts claimed the lives of two young men, Charles Lucas and Tommy Fay, whose bravery cost them everything.
By the storm’s end, Westhampton had lost 29 residents, with many more injured or displaced. The Patio Building became emergency headquarters, while morgues were set up at the Country Club and in private homes. Survivors picked through wreckage for loved ones and possessions, while volunteers rowed across the bay to ferry the stranded to safety.
The “Long Island Express” remains seared into local memory—not only for its suddenness but also for the stories of courage and human endurance. “One night lasted two lifetimes,” said a lone survivor of the Surf and Dune Club, who swam three hours through debris-choked water to shore.
Eighty-seven years later, Westhampton and Quogue are rebuilt, but the storm’s legacy is written in their landscape—in Shinnecock Inlet, in rebuilt dunes and bridges, and in the memories of families who endured. The anniversary stands as both a warning and a testament: nature’s fury may strike without notice, but so too does the strength of community rise in its aftermath.
Many thanks to the Quogue Historical Society for assembling the stories in their book, “The 1938 Hurricane as We Remember It.”