Setting the Stage for Disaster on Cape Cod

While the February storm known as "the Blizzard of '78" is the weather event that everyone remembers from that brutal winter of 1978, it wasn't the only above-average storm of the season. About a month earlier, another storm buried the New England region in snow and sent high winds across the area, but the storm struck during a period of lower tides and Cape Cod's Outer Beach remained intact. The stage, however, was now set for disaster in the event of another big storm -- and it happened.

In this video, Nan Turner Waldron, author of the book "Journey to Outermost House" and a longtime seasonal resident of Henry Beston's "Fo'castle" (which was swallowed by the sea in the February storm), and former Cape Cod National Seashore ranger Jack Clarke, who was on hand at Coast Guard Beach in Eastham when Beston's famous seaside cottage was swept away, recall how the January storm set the stage for disaster in February.

Don Wilding, author of the book "Henry Beston's Cape Cod" and executive director of the Henry Beston Society, will feature more of this video footage and extensive photographs during a special talk at 2:45 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 16, 2008 at the Cape Cod National Seashore's Salt Pond Visitors Center on Route 6 in Eastham on Cape Cod.

For more information, visit:

http://blogs.capecodonline.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=henrybeston

http://www.henrybeston.org