Side Salad

LETTER FROM THE STORM

Another pre-Hurricane Isabel update from Willie Drye at the Side Salad Doppler 2000 Weather Center in North Carolina:

9/17/2003 4:36 P.M.

Hey guys:

We've definitely entered the creepy preliminary phase. The sun is completely gone, and it's been looking like dusk since about 3 p.m. My barometer has nudged down a hair, to 30.29. I'm wondering how low it's going to go. When Floyd came through four years ago it went down to 29.15 and that's the lowest I'd seen it in three hurricanes.



Wind is pretty steady now off the Roanoke River, I'm no good at estimating wind speeds but it's brisk and occasionally gusting, and it's raining sporadically, not heavy rain but just occasional scattered drops. Swells are rolling in against the east-flowing river current. The plywood is going up on Water Street downtown, and town workers are piling sandbags around the sewage pumping station.

I drove down to the Albemarle Sound (a few miles downriver from here) a little while ago and went across the 3.5-mile sound bridge. Swells rolling in from the east, lots of whitecaps, stripes of spindrift across the water. Gusts on the bridge shoving me around a little bit.

Jane and I are going to walk down to the Roanoke Oyster Bar in an hour or so and have oysters and beer. If anything changes tonight I'll let you know.

Later,

Willie