THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 16, 1995 TAG: 9508160420
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GUY FRIDDELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
All storms hereabouts are measured against the Great Hurricane of 1933.
They didn't name hurricanes back then; but in accounts, both oral and in print over 62 years, it became known as the ``granddaddy of all hurricanes.''
Two earlier hurricanes had built up Willoughby Spit, the long curving finger of sand that leads westward along Ocean View to the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.
In October 1749 a hurricane, sweeping across Hampton Roads, destroyed Fort George, which stood on the present site of Fort Monroe.
Sand churned up by the storm accumulated on shoals adjacent to land that later was patented about 1626 by Captain Thomas Willoughby on what is now Ocean View.
Another devastating hurricane in 1806 added to nature's narrow sand pile so bountifully that it began to appear on maps and nautical charts as Willoughby Spit.
When the Hurricane of 1933 struck, the fear was that it might return Willoughby's sands to the Bay as its raging waters raced over the strand, marooning hundreds, flooding wrecked houses.
The hurricane originated near the Windward Islands and traveled on a northwesterly course toward the South Atlantic coast.
Portents of the storm came to Hampton Roads in a torrential downpour that began Sunday, Aug. 20 at 8 p.m. and continued through the night until 8 a.m. with 6.5 inches of rain.
The storm reached Cape Hatteras on the night of Aug. 22-23 with winds of 100 miles an hour.
Moving across land to Hampton Roads, the hurricane winds abated to 70 miles an hour shortly after 6:30 a.m. and thereafter were clocked as low as 40 miles an hour with an average of 57.
It wasn't the wind, however, that the storm would be remembered for but the rising water that left many downtown Norfolk streets looking like the canals of Venice.
The advancing storm bottled up the Chesapeake Bay, not allowing any water out, and then its winds pushed the Bay's contents south.
They spilled into the city leaving people to wade waist deep and making boats the best means of transit as the storm waned. The cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth were in darkness.
The hurricane had the all-time high tide for the area, 9.69 feet above mean low water. High tides blocked roads to Ocean View and Virginia Beach.
In warehouses, the water rose into stacks of heavy merchandise. Under three feet of water were foodstuffs. A downtown theater appeared to have been converted into a swimming pool. Ten feet of water flooded the basement of the YMCA on Boush Street. Rising waters liberated the goldfish in the fountain at the courthouse.
In Portsmouth, where the destroyer Babbitt was awaiting repairs in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, flood waters overran the dry dock's gates and set the ship afloat.
Among 18 lives lost in Hampton Roads, three occurred in Portsmouth when a child, wading in water in front of her house, touched a fallen, submerged high tension wire and fell. She and her mother, and a neighbor trying to rescue them, were electrocuted.
In Virginia Beach, three cottages at Cape Henry were washed into the sea. Water and winds wrecked the Cavalier Beach Club.
Coast Guardsmen carried to the Cavalier Hotel 70 residents of Cavalier Shores whose homes were threatened by the storm.
``That storm was a killer,'' WTAR's Collins Robertson said long after. ``I went through several storms years later, but I never saw one like the Hurricane of 1933.'' by CNB