New film relives fearsome 1962 Ash Wednesday Storm 

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on September 15, 2023

 ‘Praying that God will spare your very life’

With as many as 300 people in attendance, the Town of Nags Head’s Ash Wednesday Storm documentary premiered at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head on Sept. 14. A co-production of the Town and the Outer Banks History Center, the film was funded by a grant from CurrentTV with production assistance from Rayolight Productions.

A powerful nor’easter, the storm spun off the East Coast for four days, from March 5-9, 1962. The full brunt of the storm struck the Outer Banks on March 7—Ash Wednesday. The National Weather Service called it the Great Atlantic Coast Storm of 1962, but Outer Banks photographer and publicist Aycok Brown was more lyrical. Noting that the date when the waves began to breach the sand dunes along the shoreline was Ash Wednesday, he named it the Ash Wednesday Storm. And the name stuck.

The power and the destruction the storm left in its wake are legendary. According to Erik Heden, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the National Weather Service in eastern North Carolina, the damage from the Ash Wednesday Storm is still unprecedented. A 2012 story in the Coastal Review Online reported that on the Outer Banks, 60 buildings were destroyed and approximately 1,300 buildings were severely damaged by the storm.

“No other storm in at least the last 50 years has taken away more buildings or land than the Ash Wednesday storm and that’s according to the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey],” Heden said when describing the storm in the documentary.

The film highlighted the personal stories of the people who experienced a night and day of terror as they fled their homes in frigid waters and howling winds.

Juanita Wescott opened the documentary by describing what it was like to live in fear for hours, wondering if she would survive. “From six o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon…with a lot of hours of praying that God will spare your very life,” she said.

And it was Wescott who described her father coming into her and her sister’s bedroom early in the morning.

“‘Get out. Don’t stop or anything,’” she recalled him saying. “So I slid my shoes on. I threw my winter coat on. It was freezing out and I grabbed my schoolbooks…The wind was so strong that it blew Mama over and she fell down to the cement. We finally got Mama back up. It was really hurricane force winds.”

That was at 5:30 in the morning and what she was witnessing was terrifying.

“The water was coming over through the sand dunes and washing down into the highway. I looked up at Daddy and said, ‘Daddy What about school today?’” she remembered asking.

In the film, Buster Nunemaker described when he first realized how bad the situation was.

“I would go…out to the beach road to catch the school bus, and as I went around… our house, the water was already about knee deep…So I immediately went back in the house and I told my mom and dad, ‘We probably won’t be going to school today because the ocean’s coming across [the dunes]. It’s already filled the road up,’” he recounted.

That was the beginning of a day of terror.

“The first place they put me was standing me on the toilet in the bathroom, and I watched the water come in and flood the tub,” he said. “It took me jumping through the bathroom window at dad’s house into a wooden skiff. I can remember the wind howling and blowing and the water still coming up.”

The family got to his grandmother’s house which was on slightly higher ground, but even from the safety of his grandmother’s home, the power of the storm was evident.

“From my grandmother’s house, we watched Bowen’s Store [Nags Head Sportswear] burn to the waterline and for a 12-year-old boy watching, this was out of the norm. I can only say that a lot of feelings go through you even today from that time when things were happening almost instantaneously.” As he retold the story, Nunemaker’s voice began to crack with emotion.

In a panel discussion after the showing of the documentary, Wescott told the audience that even 60 years later, certain events can still trigger reactions.

“When I go to a movie like The Perfect Storm, I’ve had to leave the room and go out because when the waves get so big, it just it’s like it’s coming back to you,” she said.

Nags Head’s The Ash Wednesday Storm

In the documentary, Wescott and Nunemaker who were middle school age in 1962, referenced going to school a number of times. In the panel discussion, Nunemaker explained why that was so important.

“What was our social media of the time?” he asked. “School. We were so worried about not going to school because that was our social get together. That was our social life.”

“You didn’t miss school,” Wescott added. “Even if you were sick. You went to school.”

One of the most remarkable features of the Ash Wednesday Storm was how much it was really a coastal storm. Although inland it did spawn record snowfalls in mountain areas, the full fury was felt along shorelines from Florida to New England, with almost no impact further inland.

That was certainly the case along the Outer Banks.

“When you got to Manteo, other than a little bit of wind, you didn’t know there was a storm. They didn’t realize there was a bad storm,” Wescott said in the film.

The storm also struck with little warning.

According to Wescott in the documentary, the experts did not know how bad things would get. By March 6, she could see the Atlantic Ocean was building and a storm coming. But when she asked her father about it, she was told, “’I called the Elizabeth City weather station and they said there’s nothing out there. Not to worry.’”

Asked by the Voice if modern forecast models would have predicted the storm, Heden was emphatic.

“It would be pretty hard not to see this in this day and age,” he said.

Nags Head’s The Ash Wednesday Storm is also available on Dare County’s Current TV.

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