CAPE MAY — While the world has turned its attention to Hurricane Dean, residents ask themselves, “Could it happen here?”

The answer is yes. In 1821, Cape May experienced a Category 4 hurricane. While no living person remembers the storm, newspapers of the day and the military gathered information.

While storms were not named in the 1800s, the 1821 hurricane is often referred to as the Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane.

According to the Web site Hurricaneville.com, the 1821 storm was the last major hurricane to make a direct landfall in this state. The Category 4 hurricane hit Cape May on Sept. 3, 1821. It was believed to have had winds of 135 mph.

Hurricane force winds extended as far west as Philadelphia while New Jersey residents experienced wind gusts of up to 200 mph.
It followed the path of today’s Garden State Parkway to New York City.

The Hurricane of 1821 was born off the African coast.

According to the Web site Hurricane-Disasters-Live, the storm was first seen on Sept. 1 when it struck Guadeloupe. It notes as the hurricane turned to the north after passing the Bahamas, it was very intense, likely a Category 4 and possibly even a Category 5.

Hurricaneville.com said ships near Grand Turk Island in the Turks and Caicos Islands noted the hurricane.

It was a very fast-moving storm. On Sept. 3, 1821 at dawn, it was located off Cape Haterras, North Carolina.
By mid-afternoon, it was in Delaware Bay. By 7:30 p.m. it was pounding New York City.

It is also suspected the eye passed directly over Cape Henlopen, Del. and Cape May, because both experienced between 15 and 30 minutes of calm winds during the storm.
Storm surge sent water across Cape Island from the bay to the ocean.

According to Greg Hoffman’s Really Lousy Weather Web site, the hurricane smashed directly into Cape May Point. He notes, “Mercifully, in 1821, virtually no one lived on New Jersey's barrier Islands.”

A press clipping said the hurricane severed Cape May from the rest of the peninsula.

Newspaper records and geological evidence from Whale Beach, located between Sea Isle City and Strathmere, provide a glimpse of a storm that probably affected more seagulls than people in a sparsely populated county.

Jeff Donnelly, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, took a series of sediment core samples, digging deep into wetlands behind Whale Beach in 2001, finding significant deposits of beach material dating back to the early 1800s.

When a strong hurricane hits with storm surge, sand and gravel from the beach wash into the salt marshes. He told the Herald in 2005 that the 1821 hurricane overtopped every beach from Cape May to western Long Island with a storm surge of about 10 feet.
He said the storm was believed to have traveled along the Jersey coast at 50 mph.

“If a storm was moving at 50 mph, you do not have days to evacuate people, you have hours,” said Donnelly.

“The question is, how often do these really occur,” said Donnelly. “Is it a one-in-100-year or a one-in-500-year event? We are trying to determine if they occur more when there are warmer sea surface temperatures.”

He said global temperatures are rising and an increase in hurricanes is occurring.

Since the storm was moving so quickly, Donnelly said winds were likely to be 50 mph higher on the east side of the hurricane. He said the forward speed of hurricanes accelerate as they move into the higher latitudes which does not give the storm time to lose some of its punch.

When the storm reached New York City, it brought with it massive flooding that has not been equaled since that time.

In a story for live-science.com., Robert Roy Britt notes when the hurricane arrived in New York City, “it pushed the tide up 13 feet in one hour and inundated wharves, causing the East River and the Hudson River to merge across lower Manhattan as far north as Canal Street.”

At a meeting of the Geological Society of America in 2006 in Philadelphia, Donnelly reported if a storm like the 1821 hurricane, which tracked over the entire eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Connecticut, were to strike today, the impacts would be devastating.

He said coastal populations in these states total over 45 million and insured coastal property exceeds $1.4 trillion.

The financial loss associated a storm like the 1821 hurricane today would likely far exceed that of the nation’s most costly natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many lives may also be lost due to future hurricane strikes because of difficulties evacuating this densely populated region in advance of a fast-moving intense hurricane, said Donnelly.