September 17, 2003
A HARD RAIN'S GONNA FALL
Willie Drye, author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, is sitting in North Carolina, looking down the barrel of Hurricane Isabel.
He sends along this note:
Hey guys:
It's a beautiful day here, sunny and cool, but I can see clouds gathering overhead and the satelllite image at AccuWeather shows that they're the clouds at the extreme western edge of Isabel. And the wind is picking up, occasionially gusting. My barometer, which I think is reasonably accurate, hasn't budged since last night and is showing 30.30 inches. I imagine it'll start getting weird sometime late tonight or early tomorrow morning.
Monday night I ran down the coast to Wilmington to put up some plywood on my mother-in-law's house. Today Jane and I hauled off a couple of pickup truck loads of brush and branches and we're getting loose stuff out of the yard. We've already done all the usual stuff -- extra water, fueled up the cars, extra cash, extra cat food, etc. The forecast is showing that the thing is going to come ashore somewhere between Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout (75 to 125 miles, more or less, southeast of here), and they're saying it might blow up to a Cat 3 before it comes ashore. I just hope there's a lot of land between us and where it makes landfall so there will be lots of room to take it down some before it gets here.
I'm wondering how this one will compare to Floyd, which went right over us in '99. We had 80 mph winds, a tornado and a 500-year rainfall then, but we stayed high and dry while everything around us went under water. We've had a lot of rain this year, though, the heaviest rainfall on record, so I hear, and I'm worried about trees coming down because the ground's so wet.
I'll keep you posted occasionally until the power goes out and/or the phone lines go down.
Later,
Willie