THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508200039
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
At daybreak, B.M. Stanton raised his window shades to find the Atlantic Ocean inches away. Come late morning, the ocean found him.
Churned to mountains by a strong northeaster and a freak tide, waves destroyed the concrete bulkhead shielding Stanton's home, sucked away the sand behind the wall, then punched out a seaside bay window. Water poured in.
Next door, a mammoth surge of water wiped the porch from Paul and Sarah Huber's summer house. Another crashed through its front wall and stole the living room furniture.
It was March 7, 1962, Ash Wednesday, and the storm that would borrow the holy day's name was just getting started. Through five tide cycles, water overwhelmed the meager dunes protecting Virginia Beach and stormed across Atlantic Avenue. It swallowed Norfolk's Willoughby Spit, making islands of its houses. Long fingers of the Chesapeake Bay inundated East Ocean View, Ocean Park and Chick's Beach.
Newcomers to Hampton Roads need only review the pain wrought by the Ash Wednesday storm to understand why municipal leaders, emergency coordinators and beach dwellers dread the power of wind and tide.
And they need only consider the region's tremendous growth since 1962 to conclude that Hurricane Felix, had it come ashore, stood to inflict far greater damage than its 1962 predecessor.
Where a scattering of low-slung Oceanfront motels once stood, high-rises stand shoulder-to-shoulder for 40 blocks. Expensive, year-round homes crowd the North End. In Sandbridge, where about 50 cottages braved the weather then, about 1,500 houses now stand unsheltered atop a narrow, eroding sandspit.
Just inland, pasture land and bog has spawned dense tract housing, built to accommodate a Virginia Beach citizenry that has more than quadrupled since 1960. Much of the housing stands on low-lying ground vulnerable to flooding.
``The biggest, obvious problem - on the resort area, to some extent, and in Sandbridge in particular - is all the expensive building that's taken place right on the water,'' said Virginia Beach City Councilman John A. Baum.
``I don't want to see anybody hurt, but that's a little like thumbing your nose in the face of Mother Nature.''
Such development prompted Beach officials to estimate a decade ago that an Ash Wednesday replay would cause 75 times the nearly $9 million in property damage the city suffered in 1962.
``Even if I am 50 percent off,'' then-development director Aubrey V. Watts said at the time, ``Three hundred million (dollars) is pretty much damage.''
The area does have one thing going for it these days: It usually knows when trouble is coming.
In 1962, that wasn't the case. Jaded by northeasters, locals didn't bother about the storm as it approached. Few realized the winds coincided with abnormally high tides, which beefed up its muscle.
``The winds were not that bad,'' said Anne Henry, a former teacher who lives four blocks from the beach, as she did then.
``On my way to school I noticed a few branches down, but nothing unusual. The first thing I knew about it was that a student came in and said that part of the pier was in Lake Holly.''
He meant the 15th Street pier - which, to be in Lake Holly, would have had to break up and travel two blocks over land.
By the time Henry learned the student wasn't teasing, damage was well under way. With each new high tide, the ocean spilled over the dunes and into the Oceanfront's roads and homes.
``At about 11 o'clock, I got a call from my next-door neighbor that the water was getting close to the house,'' said Paul S. Huber Jr. ``He called back at 12 o'clock and said, `Paul, the water is washing away your porch.'
``I went down there, and I was just amazed. The house looked like somebody had broken its back. And it happened so quickly that it was already all over.''
The Boardwalk buckled, crumbled, fell away. Hotel lawns went next. The owners of the Colonial Inn desperately tried to interrupt the pounding with a makeshift breakwater of junked cars.
Water covered the North End and sliced the resort strip at 24th Street. Sandbridge was slammed. A dozen cottages in Ocean Park were demolished.
Everywhere, the water shoved chunks of timber and roof and pier ahead of it. In Ocean View's Cottage Line section, a 40-foot, storm-tossed log rammed through one home's seawall.
``The ocean was coming up the street with all sorts of debris,'' said Martha Tankersley, who lived at 26th and Baltic. ``I couldn't believe it, these pieces of things that had been on the Oceanfront and parts of the Boardwalk.''
Army amphibious vehicles evacuated the stranded, and National Guardsmen kept a lookout for looters. For two full days, the water chipped away at the shore.
When the storm ended, on March 9, Stanton's house had snapped in two. The Hubers' cottage was so smashed it had to be demolished. On the same block of Ocean Front Avenue, a single wall was all that remained of a third home.
They were among thousands of homes damaged, dozens destroyed.
Stanton, who restored his cottage, telephoned his son Buck, a student at Duke. ``He said, `Everything's all right,' '' Buck recalled. ``I said, `What are you talking about?' and he told me to get a newspaper.
``So I looked around the fraternity house and I found one. And there, on the front page, was a picture of what was left of our house.'' ILLUSTRATION: FILE PHOTO
The Ash Wednesday storm of 1962 left the Oceanfront littered with
debris. Through five tide cycles, the storm hammered homes, buckled
the Boardwalk and sliced through seawalls, causing $9 million in
damage. Virginia Beach officials fear that a similar storm today
would cost $675 million.
KEYWORDS: STORMS HURRICANES by CNB