In several places around the state, houses float off their foundations and out to sea. Waves break through a thirty-foot sand dune at Ballston Beach in Truro and flood the headwaters of the Pamet River. Six-thousand-pound boat moorings drag inside Chatham Harbor. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth shuts down because seaweed clogs the condenser intakes. A Delta Airlines pilot at Logan is surprised to see spray from breaking waves top the 200-foot cranes on Deer Island; just sitting on the runway, his airspeed indicator clocks eighty miles an hour. Houses are washed out to sea in Gloucester, Swampscott, and on Cape Cod. Rising waters inundate half of the town of Nantucket. A man is swept off the rocks in Point Judith, Rhode Island, and is never seen again, and a surfer dies trying to ride twenty-foot shorebreak in Massachusetts. Plum Island is cut in half by the waves, as is Hough's Neck and Squantum, in Quincy. Over one hundred houses are destroyed in the town of Scituate, and the National Guard has to be called out to help the inhabitants evacuate. One elderly woman is taken from her house by a backhoe while surf breaks down her front door.
The winds have set so much water in motion that the ocean gets piled up against the continent and starts blocking the rivers. The Hudson backs up one hundred miles to Albany and causes flooding, and the Potomac does the same. Tides are five feet above normal in Boston Harbor, within one inch of an all-time Boston record. Had the storm occurred a week earlier, during the highest tides of the month, water levels would be a foot and a half higher, flooding downtown Boston. Storm surge and huge seas extinguish Isle of Shoals and Boone's Island lighthouses off the coast of Maine. Some Democrats are cheered to see waves obliterate the front of President Bush's summer mansion in Kennebunkport. Damage along the East Coast surpasses one and a half billion dollars, including millions of dollars in lobster pots and other fixed fishing gear.
"The only light I can shed on the severity of the storm is that until then, we had never—ever—had a lobster trap move offshore," says Bob Brown. "Some were moved thirteen miles to the west. It was the worst storm I have ever heard of, or experienced."
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BY nightfall on the 30th—with wave heights at their peak and the East Coast bearing the full brunt of the storm—the Coast Guard finds itself with two major search-and-rescue operations on its hands. In Boston, a Coast Guardsman starts telephoning every harbormaster in New England, asking if the Andrea Gail is in port. If the town is too small to have a harbormaster, they ask a town selectman to walk down to the waterfront and take a look. Coast Guard cutters also poke their way along the coast checking every harbor and cove they can find. In Maine's Jonesport area a cutter checks Sawyers Cove, Roque Harbor, Black Cove, Moose Peak Light, Chandler and Englishman Bay, Little Machias Bay, Machias Bay East Side, Machias Bay West Side, and Mistaken Harbor, all without success. The entire coast from Lubec, Maine, to eastern Long Island is scrutinized without turning up any sign of the Andrea Gail
The search for Rick Smith is in some ways simpler than for the Andrea Gail because the pilots know exactly where he went down, but a single human being—even with a strobe light—is extremely hard to spot in such conditions. (One pilot missed a five-hundred-foot freighter because it was obscured by waves during one leg of his search.) As a result, the combined assets of half a dozen East Coast airbases are thrown into the search. Smith has a wife and three daughters at home and he knows, personally, a significant proportion of the people who are looking for him. He's one of the most highly trained survival swimmers in the world and if he hits the water alive, he'll probably stay that way. He might eventually die of thirst, but he's not going to drown.
The first thing the Coast Guard does is drop a radio marker buoy where the other Guardsmen were picked up; the buoy drifts the way a person would, and the search area shifts continuously southwestward. Planes fly thirty-mile trackline searches five hundred feet above the water, but in these conditions the chances of spotting a man are only one in three, so some areas get flown over and over again. There are so many planes in the air, and the search area is so limited, that it's a virtual certainty they'll find him. And indeed, they find almost everything. They find the nine-man life raft pushed out of the helicopter by Jim Mioli. A Guard diver is dropped from a helicopter to knife it so it won't throw off other searchers. They find the Avon raft abandoned by the Tamaroa, and rafts from other boats they didn't even know about. And then, just before dusk on the 31st, a Coast Guard plane spots a stain of Day-Glo green dye in the water.