Hurricane Hazel’s impact in Crisfield. (Ellis Malashuk, Baltimore Sun files, 1954)

While the Atlantic hurricane season has been relatively tame this year with only five named storms, hurricanes Hazel in 1954, and Sandy in 2012, proved that such major weather events are possible in October.

The hurricane season of 1954 spawned a trio of deadly storms that despite their old-fashioned names were deadly in their collective ferocity.

After Edna howled up the coast, along came Carol, and then Hazel, which according to authors Larry Savadove and Margaret Thomas Buchholz in their 1993 book, “Great Storms of the Jersey Shore,” came “crashing up the coast like a ‘screaming freight train,’ as one writer put it, crashing dunes twenty feet high, crushing houses and creasing roads.”

Hazel was lethal from the beginning, having killed thousands of people in Haiti, inundating the Carolinas with 11 inches of rain, and setting wind-speed records in Washington and New York City. Winds were estimated at 150 mph.

It would take Hazel two weeks to finally die over Ontario. But not before dumping enough rain on Toronto that caused buildings and bridges to be swept away, in a $100 million curtain call.

Hazel had raced over Myrtle Beach, S.C., barreled up past the Carolinas and Virginia, as it continued drawing its tremendous energy from warm, tropical waters.

Hurricane Hazel overtakes a road and downs telephone lines near Point Lookout. (Baltimore Sun files, 1954)

The storm now approached Maryland, and by the afternoon of Oct. 15, winds were gusting over 60 mph, toppling pedestrians as they waited for streetcars. A plate glass window on a North Eutaw Street furniture store suddenly exploded, but injured no passersby.

In Annapolis, the USS Reina Mercedes, a Naval Academy training ship with 52 men aboard and no power, suddenly parted its lines and was drifting dangerously close to a Severn River bridge before being towed to safety.

As trees toppled throughout the state, there were widespread power outages and telephone disruptions. High water and swirling floods coursed through Western Maryland.

Rail travel was also disrupted with some 15 Pennsylvania Railroad trains being delayed up to 12 hours.

Charles R. Nicholas, 44, a Chicago businessman, had boarded the Boston-bound Patriot at Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station. Standing in the vestibule of the train’s dining car, he was suddenly blown off the train as it entered the Hoffman Street tunnel, by a gust of wind that was attributed to Hazel.

Sucked out of the door, the stunned Nicholas lay between the rails as the remaining cars passed over him. Once it was gone, he rose to his feet and walked to an East Baltimore drugstore where the pharmacist alerted police.

Examined at the old St. Joseph Hospital on Caroline Street in East Baltimore, Nicholas was apparently none the worse for his shortened rail journey.

The Eastern Shore was not spared, with oyster and crab houses being destroyed by Hazel’s winds. A freight car, buffeted by the hurricane, rolled aimlessly along PRR rails between Sudlersville and Millington, before derailing.

At 6:42 p.m. on Oct. 15, the Weather Bureau announced that the center of the storm had gone past Baltimore, and in a terse bulletin said: “Baltimore has had it.”

Seventeen babies were born in Baltimore hospitals during the storm, and none was named Hazel. But a baby girl delivered at Mercy Hospital was named Gale by her mother, Mrs. Myra Wire.

Hurricane Hazel was the deadliest and costliest storm of the 1954 season, which left in its wake 95 dead in the U.S. and 81 in Canada. And because of the loss of life and the damages it inflected, Hazel’s name was permanently retired.