WEATHER: Flirt

After the sneak attack by Hurricane Carol (TIME, Sept. 13), which took 68 lives and destroyed half a billion dollars’ worth of New England property, the entire Atlantic seaboard was anxiously alerted for the next big seasonal storm to come rolling north. There was not long to wait. Before New England had half mopped up the mess left by Carol, Hurricane Dolly roared harmlessly by. Then came Edna.*

Like her older sister Carol, Hurricane Edna proved to be a dangerous ondine, full of feminine caprices and packing a 125-mile-per-hour wallop. When first sighted last week, she was off the Bahamas, churning like a top and headed northwest. For five days she minced slowly northward in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast, while along the shore hurricane flags went up, storm shutters slammed down, and everybody waited breathlessly. HURRICANE TO HIT HEAD-ON UNLESS

‘MIRACLE’ SAVES CITY, trumpeted the New York World-Telegram & Sun. New York battened down and buttoned up, prepared for the worst. Commuters hurried home to secure the family car and bring in the garbage pails. Radio and TV turned their full attention to the big wind. (“Hurricane Edna,” announced one television commercial perfunctorily, “is being presented to you as a public service by Con Edison.”)

But New York and much of New England were merely sideswiped, left drenched and unhurt as the big wind fumed up the coast. Edna ultimately suffered the fate of many girls who can’t make up their minds: she wound up with a split personality. Over Cape Cod she divided into halves. She made her final schizophrenic landfall over Maine and shrieked into Canada’s Maritime Provinces and New foundland. Casualties: 18 dead; damages: an estimated $50 million. Edna’s indisputable claim to fame, however, was in the fact that she scared more people than she injured. Fifty million Americans, Bahamians and Canadians, living on or near Edna’s path, kept an anxious eye on her meanderings through the week, and did not really relax until she finally spun out into the North Atlantic.

*Named, in alphabetical order, for the year’s fifth hurricane. U.S. meteorologists, always resourceful, have already picked names for the next 18 big tropical storms that may or may not materialize before the end of 1954: Florence, Gilda, Hazel, Irene, Jill, Katherine, Lucy, Mabel, Norma, Orpha, Patsy, Queen, Rachel, Susie, Tina, Una, Vicky and Wallis.