The air was already thick when M.L. Baron and his team arrived at the New Bedford hurricane barrier in the wee hours of Aug. 19. The water was eerily quiet, but Baron wasn’t fooled.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” he recalled. “But we were ready to do battle.”
That was 25 years ago. But Baron, a self-described “hurricane historian” who has worked as a spotter for West Island Weather since 1978, remembers every detail of the day Hurricane Bob barreled into the Massachusetts coast — Aug. 19, 1991.
Owners scrambling to get their boats out of the water ahead of the storm. Countless trees, along with a nearly 400-foot radio tower, toppled by 100-mile-per-hour winds. Surging seas, 15 feet above normal. The sun finally shining through the clouds, hours later.
It was one of the worst storms ever to hit New England, and remains the last hurricane to make landfall in Massachusetts. After swirling up the Eastern Seaboard, Hurricane Bob caused $680 million in damage in New England, $39 million in Massachusetts. The southeastern part of the state bore the brunt of the destruction, especially along Buzzards Bay.
Tourists who had flocked to Cape Cod for a beach escape found a battered coastline — parts of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard lost 50 feet of sand. The winds riled up hordes of bees and wasps, whose angry stings filled emergency rooms.
Twenty-five years later, people still speak of the hurricane with awe.
“It was just an amazing storm,” recalled Eleanor Vallier-Talbot, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Taunton.
In Falmouth, the town’s renowned road race had taken place the day before. Karen Murphy, owner of the waterside restaurant Shuckers, had prepared for the crowds by stocking up on extra ingredients, only to have them destroyed in the flooding.
“Within an hour we went from having nothing to probably 4 feet of water inside the restaurant. It was like a swimming pool,” Murphy recalled. She and her husband were in a side alley, near the outdoor seating, when the water poured in.
“We had to swim up the alley to get out,” she said.
The restaurant was badly damaged, but as one of the only spots in town with propane tanks, it quickly became a rallying point.
“We put some chowder on and got anybody anything that we could for those first couple days,” she recalled.
Joye Creedon, 59, had just moved to Sandwich from Connecticut when Hurricane Bob struck, and still remembers the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches her children relied on in the days that followed.
“My little ones had lots of takeout and PB&J for sure,” she said, laughing at the memory. Running water was in short supply, so she and her children brought shampoo and soap to the local pond.
Creedon’s children thought the storm was something of an adventure, but her husband was crushed when he drove to the harbor and found his boat destroyed, like so many others.
“It was a very, very sad thing,” Creedon said. “So many boats were wrapped around each other.”
Bob Griffin got his boat out in time. After hearing the weather forecast, the Falmouth assistant harbormaster, who was then a police officer, removed his boat from the water the day before the storm. Not everyone took the warnings seriously, he recalled.
“I remember talking to other policemen and saying, ‘Let’s go take the boats off the water,’ and they said, ‘Why? It’s not going to hit,’ ” said Griffin, 72.
Baron, 58, who monitored the storm for hours in his Ford Econoline van, warned against that kind of thinking, especially as Hurricane Bob recedes into memory.
“You’re going to get complacent when something doesn’t come along every year or two years or five years,” he said. “Now we’re talking a quarter of a century ago. We have a whole generation that has no experience of what a hurricane can do.”
Vallier-Talbot of the National Weather Service said there’s no way to tell when another New England hurricane might come along.
“We could go another 10 years and not get one, or we could get one late this year,” she said. “But it has been quite some time since we’ve had one up here.”
Vivian Wang can be reached at vivian.wang@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @vwang3.