How a Big Hurricane on Aug. 22, 1933 Created the Ocean City We Know Today

Ocean City dates its history back to 1875, but the resort town we know today really didn’t take shape until Aug. 22, 1933. That’s when a hellacious storm tore a hole through town and altered the course of its future forever. Nobody gave names to storms back then, so this one is generally known only as “The Hurricane of 1933.” It arrived in the midst of one of the wickedest hurricane seasons ever–20 big storms formed in the North Atlantic that year.

The storm made landfall on Tuesday, Aug. 22. But before that, Ocean City had endured four long days of torrential rain. It’s hard to believe one of the newspaper accounts I reviewed, which says that 10 inches of rain fell on Ocean City on each and every one of those four days.

That was just the warm-up act for the Hurricane of 1933, of course. The hurricane itself lasted two days. At the end here, I will provide links to some video shot while it
was raging. Winds and flooding tore up the boardwalk. Streets filled with floodwaters,sweeping cars and trucks up and away with the current. A good number of homes and businesses were washed into the ocean. (Amazingly, I have not seen any reports of fatalities specific to Ocean City, only ones that refer to seven deaths statewide.) 

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