Just before midnight on Saturday, May 14, 1921, the night operator for the Central New England Railroad depot in Brewster jumped back in horror as the switchboard in front of him suddenly burst into flames. He grabbed the cash and tickets in the station’s office and roused a sleeping colleague. Both men fled for their lives. A church bell pealed out in alarm as word of the blaze spread. Hearing that, a local man who had just returned by train from a baseball game in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—his team had lost 28 to 1—raced to help fight the fire, but it was too late.
As Brewster’s residents watched the station burn to the ground, they didn’t have to guess what had caused the inferno. The evidence was right above their heads, drawn out in colorful streaks across the sky. That night, the Northern Lights were visible not only in Brewster, a thousand miles from their usual Arctic abode, but as far south as Puerto Rico—the visible signal of what scientists consider the most powerful solar storm to hit the Earth in the 20th century. Days later, the Brewster Standard carried the unbeatable headline, “Aurora Borealis Burns Depot.”
It was not, in fact, the aurora itself that sparked the fire; rather, both the spectacular light show and the depot fire were caused by a series of coronal mass ejections from the sun, which, traveling at the speed of light across 93-million miles of space, arrived on Earth in eight minutes. Over three days, these solar flares bombarded the planet with electricity, surging into telegraph and telephone equipment and overloading them to the point of combustion. The event would go down in history as the New York Railroad Storm, and not only because of the blaze in Brewster. In Manhattan, a fire broke out in a railroad control tower north of Grand Central Terminal, at 57th Street and Park Avenue, shutting down service on the New York Central line. (A telephone exchange in Sweden also burned to the ground.)
Today, solar storms are a matter of growing concern to scientists and emergency-preparedness experts, given how much more connected our world is by mobile networks, satellites, and other forms of advanced technology vulnerable to intense waves of energy unleashed by the sun. Kathryn Schulz recently wrote in The New Yorker that a powerful solar storm on par with the one that burnt the railroad depot in Brewster in 1921 could have calamitous, even apocalyptic consequences. The time needed for recovery would be “measured, almost unthinkably,” not in days and weeks, she warned, but “in months and years.”
In 1921, the consequences were less devastating. The value of the destroyed Brewster depot was calculated at about $6,000—a little over $100,000 today. The railroad used a spare passenger car as its station for a time, until a new Tudor-style building was dedicated in 1931. It remains in use today.
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