It came without warning, crashing through New York, New England, and continuing into Canada, packing wind gusts as high as 186 mph, killing 700 people, leaving 63,000 people homeless, destroying an estimated 2 billion trees.

"It" was the unnamed "Great Hurricane of 1938," the storm that reshaped dozens of communities not only on the shore, where the storm surge was as high as 17 feet, but also hundreds of miles inland because of the flooding rains that occurred both before and during the storm.

Until August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast including New Orleans and the coastal region of Mississippi and Alabama, the 1938 hurricane was the most horrific.  Six weeks after Katrina struck, the damage estimate stood at $34.4 billion in insurance claims according to preliminary estimates by ISO’s Property Claim Services (PCS) unit.

Like the Great Hurricane of 1938, Katrina caused widespread damage to homes and businesses in six states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee and Georgia. New Orleans bore the brunt of the hurricane’s fury as rising flood waters and wind wreaked havoc on the city.  Policyholders in the affected states are expected to file more than 1.6 million claims for damage to personal and commercial property, automobiles, and boats and yachts.

Damage from the Great Hurricane was estimated at $306 million in 1938, in excess of $20.8 billion in 2002 dollars. Hurricane Andrew of 1992 also has an inflation adjusted damage estimate of $20.8 billion.

The Sept. 21, 1938 catastrophe is the sixth most damaging hurricane to strike the continental U.S. since 1926, according to Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, and Christopher Landsea, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

According to Pielke and Landsea, a 1926 unnamed Category 4 hurricane that struck Southeast Florida and then made landfall in Alabama surpasses Hurricane Andrew as the nation's most devastating hurricane when they compare all hurricane losses adjusted to 2002 dollars. That Category 4 hurricane today would cost in excess of $90 billion.

But don't let dollar estimates and hurricane category numbers fool you, says Nicholas Coch, a professor of geology at Queens College in New York.

"The Big One was 1938," says Coch, who has made a career of studying the cataclysmic storm. "No other U.S. hurricane (prior to Katrina) had struck six states at once. It hit New York state and went right on to the outskirts of Boston and then right up into Canada. It was massive."  Katrina will now most likely supplant ‘the Big One’ as New Orleans was abandoned for three weeks and may never return to its previous status as a cultural mecca and tourist destination.

Monster storm surge

Researchers say a replay of the 1938 hurricane would be especially devastating because of the monstrous storm surge and heavy flooding associated with the storm. Seas in Rhode Island during the height of the storm rose to 17 feet above normal high tide. Heavy rains before and during the storm produced river flooding, especially along the Connecticut River near Springfield, Mass. Koch says a similar storm could possibly bury New York's JFK airport under 20 feet of water.

A major hurricane striking the heavily populated regions of the Northeast is the least anticipated — and least prepared for — hurricane scenario today, according to AIR Worldwide Corp. (AIR), a catastrophe-modeling and weather-risk management company. This is because the region is often given less attention when assessing exposure to hurricane risk due to the relative infrequency of such an event. Statistically speaking, hurricanes of this severity occur once every 125 years on average. But that doesn't preclude two catastrophic hurricanes in a much shorter period followed by a century or more of relative calm.

"It's not a question of whether large losses can occur in this region, but rather when," according to a special report on Hurricane Andrew and the 1938 hurricane.You will need Adobe Acrobat to view the report.

When AIR looks at the top 10 worst places for an extreme hurricane to strike, New York captures the No. 2 spot. The 1-in-1,000-years storm to affect that particular region would be capable of producing insured losses of $26.5 billion. (AIR says total economic losses can be double the amount of insured losses.)

The No. 1 spot goes to the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area. The 1-in-1,000-years hurricane striking that heavily populated region, just north of where Andrew struck in 1992, could produce insured losses of over $60 billion. To read the Top 10 list for the largest losses from a direct strike of a 1-in-1,000-years storm, see Top 10 worst places for an extreme hurricane to strike.