September 28, 2003
HURRICANE ISABEL WRAP-UP
Just got this from Willie Drye, author of "Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935" and senior correspondant at the Side Salad Doppler 2000 Weather Center in North Carolina.
We lost our Willie feed just as the storm was about to intensify before hitting the coast and were forced to switch to our auxilliary backup weather bureau in Virginia.
Now that Willie is back on the air, it would appear that all is well, but it may be time to buy a new truck:
Hey guys.
I think the last time Jane and I checked in more than a week ago, we were about to go downtown to the Roanoke Oyster Bar for beer and oysters Wednesday night, Sept. 17. We'd done everything we could to get ready for Hurricane Isabel except, apparently, the one thing that would have spared us a lot of fear and discomfort, i.e., get the hell out of town.
The beer and oysters were great, and everybody at the bar was talking about what they'd done to get ready for Isabel. So everybody probably left the bar feeling a little better than they should have from that comforting but totally misleading sense of well-being that occurs when humans who are facing the same danger talk about the common threat for a few minutes over food and booze. Somehow, things never seem as bad as they're about to get when you've got a few beers and half a peck of steamed oysters under your belt.
Today, our ISP finally came back up. It took the cable company a week to replace the expensive, complicated box of technology they'd attached to a utility pole down the street. That box was smashed to bits by a giant oak tree that Isabel chewed off and threw across the power line Thursday a week ago. This reconnection to the world finally occurred after we'd spent a week sitting on the porch watching utility trucks from Texas, South Carolina and, I think, Louisiana going up and down Washington Street, working 12-hour shifts to restore civilization as we know it to Plymouth. And I can testify to the fact that not every single Army Reserve and National Guard soldier is in Iraq because I saw two or three truckloads of them going up and down the street every day. And NC State Troopers in their sinister silver-and-black cars, saw a lot of them. And trucks and vans from various church relief agencies. And trucks and cars with people who came both to help and to gawk. And there was 6 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew, when Jane and I sat on the front porch with candles and watched the town cops and county deputies cruising slowly down the street with spotlights sweeping the sidewalks.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to Thursday a week ago ...
My barometer started going down about midnight Wednesday. When we got up Thursday morning, it was, of course, overcast, raining, and blowing. And the barometer was steadily dropping. I didn't think too much about this because I'd been through so many other hurricanes and, of course, the barometer always drops.
Around 11:30 a.m. Thursday the wind started seriously blowing and the power went out. And it stayed out. That was a little unsettling, because we'd never lost power for more than a couple hours in the other hurricanes, even though they all went right over us.
And the damn barometer kept going down.
Sometime around 1 p.m., with the storm really getting cranked up, I did something that was really, really stupid. I got into my old '89 Isuzu pickup truck and I went out into the storm to drive the four or so blocks to the river because I wanted to check on the big plate glass windows at the maritime museum where Jane and I are volunteers. It's across the street from the water, and the gusts (those goddam nasty gusts) were starting to really slam us. So, like a total idiot, I went out. Don't ever do this at home, boys and girls, because it is totally stupid and you are not immune to the deadly dangers of a hurricane just because you've written about them and maybe think you know a little bit about them. Anyway, I got down to Main Street, which is one block from the river, and a gust came off the water that was like being hit by a giant fist. I mean, BOOM, it was like running into an invisible wall. And all of a sudden I knew what sailors mean when they say "Shiver me timbers," because that poor old pickup truck just shuddered. It was one of those seminal moments when one realizes that, in the greater scheme of things, one is indeed a piss-ant as far as the forces of Nature are concerned.
But I drove on down to the museum, and it was fine.
The worst part of the hurricane arrived here about mid-afternoon Thursday. By about 3 p.m. my barometer had dropped lower than I'd ever seen it and it was still falling. That's when I honestly started getting scared. A few minutes after 3, Jane asked me if I'd heard "that noise." I hadn't. Then Jane noticed a piece of window glass lying on the front yard. We stepped out to look, and discovered that we'd lost a window in the false dormer above our porch.
This was serious, boys and girls. Not only did it let rain blow into our house, if we got another of those nasty gusts, it could snap the roof off like a soda pop cap. And then the walls could come down, and we would indeed be having a very bad day. So I figured I had to get some plywood over the hole or risk losing the damn house. And the freaking barometer was still going down.
To phrase it diplomatically, Jane and I were a bit at odds about whether I should go out in a hurricane, crawl up on the roof, and try to bang a piece of plywood over the window. As we were discussing this, the barometer actually dropped below the lowest reading on the dial. I think it bottomed out at about 28.95 inches, but, as I said, that's only a guess because it went past the numbers. I was indeed scared now, believe me.
As for the outcome of my discussion with Jane about the lost window, I will summarize this event by saying that our marriage still survives and the plywood got nailed up with the courageous help of two neighbors who were willing to go out into a goddam raging hurricane and hold the ladder for me. I was lucky in many ways. The barometer started going back up, meaning that the beast was finally moving away from us, there were no more of those stunning gusts that would've flung me off the roof like a leaf, and Jane was still willing to talk to me. Eventually.
I stayed sane for the next couple of days by clearing tree limbs out of my yard, checking in on the 82-year-old widow next door, keeping our gasoline-powered generator fueled up, and reading Sherlock Holmes episodes by flashlight at night on the porch. Luckily, the weather did not turn overwhelmingly hot. Luckily, the wind was blowing from the northeast most of the time and dropped the trees away from our house. But there were lots of people who weren't lucky, and there are many houses that are now uninhabitable. It appears that tornadoes were spun off from this thing as it went through. There's one section just outside of town where the trees are lying down in all directions. That had to be a tornado. And Edenton, that gorgeous little colonial town on the other side of the Albemarle Sound, got whacked worse than we did, so I hear.
And that huge oak tree that took out our electricity and cable service? If I'd made my foolish little trip downtown an hour or so later, it would've landed squarely on my Isuzu. And that damn gust I ran into seems to have done something to the pickup, it was running perfectly before the storm and now is blowing blue smoke all over the place like the head gasket's gone or something.
Still, as bad as this blow was, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. First, the southern Outer Banks got whacked much harder than we did. Second, as bad as Isabel was (and I don't mean to sound snide) it really was not a big league hurricane. Andrew in 1992 was a big league hurricane. Camille in 1969 was a big league hurricane, and Hugo in '89 and Hazel in 1954 were big league hurricanes. This thing was, like, Class AA at best, a storm with a couple of clever moves, some occasional power and some good publicity, but a storm that blew out most of its power (thank God) before it made landfall and thus simply was not one of the big boys. It was, I think, a Category 2 when it came ashore. But it still kicked ass, it still carved a new inlet and created a new island off the N.C. coast, and it still left me with a more profound understanding of my own insignificance.
So anyway, that's what happened here in the sticks when the big storm blew through.
Later,
Willie