It's a category 2 hurricane out here. Did the western eye come ashore? Yes, it did. It came right across right down over top of us. Right there. There is the hurricane landfall project truck. It's all set up, strapped down. We're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while. Standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe. We are getting into the eye wall of Hurricane Jean right now. more came in on shore here along the southeast coast of Florida. These little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that

surge. Hello once again and welcome to another edition of stories from the hurricane highway. I am your host Mark Sudd. Great to be back with you. I'm about as excited as I get to produce one of these episodes because we are up to
the hurricane Irma saga. And what an
incredible saga it was. This will be in
two parts. Part one here will cover
Irma's beginnings and all the anxiety
and anticipation as it moved across the Atlantic becoming a category 5 hurricane
for days on end. And then it's menacing
of the Northeast Caribbean and the
different people that I met through social media. I'll tell you all about that. And then of course we get to the landfall in Florida. We'll cover that in part two. Just some incredible stories. And it all ends up with uh again the landfall in Florida, one of many landfalls, of course. And we end the uh
Irma saga with a very interesting change that would sort of be forced upon me and
the project related to the live cameras.
So stay tuned for that little cliffhanger for you. little little baiting for you, a little teaser to make sure you listen to both episodes. So, in this episode, first one of two of the
Irma saga. We'll start at the beginning and uh we'll go all the way back to when I was in Texas and uh finishing up the
Harvey field work. We saw Irma starting
in the tropical weather outlooks. We saw it in the computer models, you know, the GFS and the Euro go out to more than a
week. And so we were easily um lured
into watching this energy come off Africa in what was a very active period

that Harvey basically kicked off right
there around August 20th or so. uh it didn't stop for a while and Irma was part of that overall burst of activity,
which is interesting because there were some folks that were saying that, yo know, we'd have Harvey, we'd have Irma, and then everything would just shut down. It didn't didn't look very favorable, they thought. And boy, were they wrong because we went up, you know, several more storms. We had Jose, we had Maria, and we'll talk about all those later. But Irma officially is named. It

was interesting. It it jumped out real quick on the 11:00 advisory. That was
advisory number one on Wednesday, August
30th. And again, I'm still at this point in time in Houston wrapping up the
Harvey mission and Irma was on the map.
And uh I remember as I headed back to
North Carolina the 31st and then finally got home on September 1st. As I was traveling back, I went south through New Orleans. I don't remember why I did that. I think it was some of the models
with Irma would bring it um into the
Carolinas. You know how the 16-day GFS can go. Um and this was like 10 to 12 days out or something like that. But I remember I went through New Orleans because I had sort of this weird feeling. Obviously, it was wrong, but I thought, well, let me go through New Orleans and just see everything down
here briefly as I drove through in case
Irma comes this way. And I'm going to tell you, anytime I stopped for gas or
at a fast food restaurant or whatever the case may be, you I had the Tahoe, so I stood out like a sore thumb, the weather instruments on it and the logos and everything. People would ask, yo know, hey man, what do you think about Irma? And we were all concerned about it
because it just had that look. And we were looking at the modeling, the
consensus, everything like the whole ensemble packages. Like there seemed to be no escape. And some very prominent people in the weather enterprise were tweeting this. Uh Eric Blake from the National Hurricane Center, Ben Null, yo know, Andy Hazelton, some of these folks, uh Dr. Michael Ventress, um, yo
know, Eric Webb, we all saw this that
there was no getting away from Irma hitting somebody west of 60° longitude

and probably west of 75, which is roughly
the Carolinas and points west, the
Western Caribbean, Northwest Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, who knows? Irma was not
going to be going out to sea it. It just seemed obvious at the get-go. So, the
very first advisory 11:00 a.m. uh on
August 30th. And I'm going to save this picture. Let's see if it'll do this for me. How do I There it is. Save image. So, this will be our picture number one in our gallery. Uh and let's see. Irma.

Just got to make sure I do this right here. Picture number one. There we go. So, that's the first photo. Uh, and it's
just a telling one, right? Because it was already 50 miles per hour. This thing came out of the gate ready to go.
And I remember in those early days tracking Irma that, you know, of course, I'm trying to drive back home. That was the 30th. I was still driving on the 31st. And I finally got home on September 1st. And again, all along the way, certainly the Harvey aftermath and it was just starting. I mean, barely. Some of it was even still going on. It took a while for that flooding to go away, but we still had the Harvey disaster. That's a good way to put it. It really wasn't the aftermath yet. And then we had Aruma coming and it was just this big sense of anxiety for a lot of people not only in Texas like gosh please don't let it come here of all places but the central GF
coast Florida and and of course the Caribbean and I noticed as I was doing
my video updates and posting stuff as I
was driving back home even that I was getting more and more interest and hits
from people and questions from people engagements from the Caribbean, the Northeast Islands, especially uh we'll call it Guadaloop, Antigua, St. Barts into the

uh Virgin Islands, US British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico. A lot more interest and it certainly made sense as to why this was the case. A lot more comments on the YouTube there from from people in those areas. And I thought that was really interesting that I was getting this international audience and
several thousand views on each of the videos that I would produce and this would continue for several days. So

going back and looking through Twitter, um I put into the archives here August
30th through September the 5th. That's my timeline. This will be sort of a good guidepost for this episode. So again,
I'm coming back from Texas. We're going to rewind the clock just a little bit because Irma and Harvey do overlap just
a hair here at the beginning. So, I get

out of Texas, making my way back home, and sure enough, by the 31st, you know, just the next day, Irma, now a category 1 hurricane. So, I'm going to advance through the frames here on the hurricane
cent's uh site for the Irma archives,
and there it was. So yeah, it it went from 70 mph on Thursday, August 31st at the 5:00
a.m. advisory. It went from 70 to 100

mph. So not only did it go, you know,
and become a hurricane, it it went from
nothing to a category 2 hurricane in a little bit over a day. That is remarkable. And we knew this was going to be a big big problem. So, I'm going
to save this picture as picture number two because it is very very uh telling
right as to how all of this was going to play out. Already Irma up to category 2
intensity and we're just to August 31st. So, there's a lot of questions from people and I even said that on Twitter. I said um on August 31st, it's funny. I
had two tweets backtoback. Irma is now a category one hurricane expected to get much stronger in the coming days. And then I said, "This is before they let you edit Twitter." I guess I could have deleted the the post, but unless I have something that's just egregiously bad, I tend to let my typos and wrong posts,
inaccurate posts stay unless it's just
really bad or whatever. Um, but so I did a correction. Said, "Correction, Irma, now a category 2 hurricane." Wow. And I
said, "I just woke up." So, forgive me. Been a long week. No kidding. Um, when did I post that? This is August 31st. What time was that? That would have been
uh 10:53 a.m. Uh, so yeah, I had, yo

know, gotten up at my hotel, took a look at everything, and Irma is already up to category 2, and it was uh uh not

forecast to reach cat 5, but of course,
it did. And I said it wouldn't shock me if it does. The hurricane center forecast is for 115 knots. As we all
know now, um Irma went on to be one of
the strongest hurricanes ever. Very, very intense at like 185 mph for couple
days if not more. And I went on to tweet that remember intensity forecasting is where there's the least amount of skill. Harvey gave us the most recent lesson in that. Irma may as well. Hey, I was right
about that. That's for sure. Um, so
yeah, people are very concerned about it. The Atlantic's very favorable. People are really starting to ask questions. They're perking up. Any videos I put out had a lot of views, a lot of engagement, which is good. Yo know, it's not about my ego. It's about
getting information out there and being
a voice of experience. Done this a long
time, even in 2017. Certainly a lot more
experience since then, right? And it was just really nice to know that people trusted what I was saying. Just a nice,

you know, looking at the hurricane center data, very calm but firm,
alarming if I needed to be just straightforward, exactly what I would do even without an audience. You know what I mean? Just here's what's happening and here's what we're going to do about it. Here's what to expect. And I thought that was really neat to see the
popularity of my videos and the brand, the Hurricane Track brand, just everything was growing. And that was really nice to see. From a business perspective, of course, that's great. You want any business to grow, but the
bottom line is part of what I do is to help people. I want to educate people and get them aware and prepared. And it was just really really neat to be able to see that engagement growing and uh it
was certainly doing so. So I make my way
again back home finally by the um the

31st and then to the 1st. I get there uh
just I'm looking through my Twitter here. Just tons and tons of engagement.
That is for sure. Uh and so I roll into North Carolina and it was interesting. Um, I'm almost home and I'm at I75 or

I'm sorry, I 95, not 75. I 95 and

interstate or highway 74 is supposed to be an interstate eventually near Lumberton, North Carolina. It's not too far north of the south of the border area. And I talked about this at the end of the last uh Harvey episode, but there is this tremendous lightning storm or thunderstorm, whatever. There's no such thing as a lightning storm, I guess, but a thunderstorm. Um, from sort
of the tail end, some leftover energy from Harvey that had caught up with me or I caught up with it, whichever way you want to look at it, uh, in eastern North Carolina. And again, it's like this little tail that that forms off these things, almost like a little front uh, from the surface low that was still out there. And uh, there was just this tremendous lightning. So, I put the drone up again. And I had the Phantom 2 quadcopter at this time. That's what we called them back then, quadcopter. Now it's ubiquitously known as a drone. And
uh just let it record the lightning, yo know, 2 or 30 hundred feet above Highway 74 where it comes out to I95. And I remember thinking, okay, I'm about 90 minutes from home. It has been just a a

a bizarre mindbending week. like all the stuff that I had experienced, the CAT 4 landfall, making sure we weren't in danger from that, the equipment deployment, the the equipment retrieval from part one, then getting up to Houston and dealing with the biggest flood disaster probably in US history. Certainly dollar-wise, luckily not from
the lives lost. There were certainly lives lost, but you know, there certainly have been worse flooding disasters before modern times in terms of fatalities, but just everything just piles up and it was exhausting. So, it's kind of nice honestly to have a couple of days to traverse back home and it does take two
days to travel from Houston to Wilmington. If you, you know, stop overnight somewhere, it's it's probably sensible to do that, right? And I
thought, all right, one journey is about to come to an end, so to speak. It never
really dies, right? And then I'm going to have a few days and then I'm going to
be right back at it. But where is it
going to be? The peninsula of Florida? Is it going to be somewhere along the Gulf Coast? Could it be the Carolinas? You know, it depends on which run of the long range models you look at. I guess that's how that goes. So, I finally get home and it's funny
here. Uh, being on Ustream, for whatever
reason, and I guess this is a good thing, they didn't have these algorithm
things so that if you played music while
you were streaming like I like to do, there would be no copyright hit. YouTube
obviously vastly larger than Ustream.
YouTube does have that. So, anytime yo know you have a webcam and there's audio and it and there happens to be background music and it's copyrighted music, you'll get a copyright strike. It's kind of annoying and story for another day. I wish they would figure out a way to mitigate that cuz I like to listen to film music. People that know me, you know that. And my favorite, it's
a real close call between John Williams and Han Zimmer. But I really like to listen to Han Zimmer. some amazing tracks from uh different scores over the years. And on Ustream, I could play
whatever I wanted. And remember, this
was generally done off of CDs. The Tahoe had a CD player. Remember
compact discs? I think I had I don't think I had
Apple the the iTunes. I mean, I know I had it on my phone, but I don't think I had a subscription. So, I think it was all CDs or I'd play it off of YouTube because people upload music to YouTube. And what's that all about? How do how do people literally upload albums? I know I'm off track here, but and they don't get copyright strikes, but I digress. But I was listening to Han Zimmer and people were as I was driving and and people were watching me drive home and they could hear the music coming through and they were commenting about it and I said on one of the tweets in response, uh, yeah, I was there in July talking about back in Houston in the Sugarland area and I saw Han Zimmer live at the new venue when I was there for the uh,
you know, the week before the storm geo seminar and I told you guys about that in a previous episode, but I'm almost
home finally after the Harvey saga and I
got to get ready for Irma. But the
interesting thing was it wasn't so much I got to get home and get equipment ready. that would come. But I got to get ready to basically live in my
office because the amount of data and

updates and attention and media requests

for interviews uh especially outside the country was
extraordinary. It really really was. So,
what I want to do, just to give you a little taste of things, by September 2nd, I got home the uh I'm kind of

lateish on the night of the 1st. Uh let me see what time that uh video was from the drone. Uh when did I do that? Um

9:00. So, 9:07 p.m. that I made it to
I95 and US74. So, I got home just before

midnight. All right. So let's take a look or a listen as it were. Um I will
look and then you will listen because it is a video discussion but I'll do the audio from it. This is September 2nd,

2017 and the tweet was latest video

discussion concerning Hurricane Irma. And I posted that at 3:07

uh in the afternoon. And it's interesting before I play this, the response from people who watched it was immediate. Jesse Huddleston, uh,
somebody on Twitter says, "Thanks for not forgetting about us in the US Virgin Islands while everyone focuses on what
happens 10 days from now." And that really meant a lot to me. So, let's take a listen here. That's a couple segments from that video discussion on the afternoon of September seu uh 2nd, 2017.
Good afternoon, Mark with hurricanetrack.com here with your hurricane outlook and discussion for the second day of September 2017. Hope your Saturday is going well. We have a lot to talk about. This is going to be a lengthy one and uh that's because it is important. So, let's go over the statistics. First of all, here is Hurricane Irma. 110 mph winds, pressure
down to 973, moving west at 15 mph. This

is going to fluctuate back and forth pressure-wise over the next few days. And windwise, but as it starts, as it
has done so recently, moving on this southwesterly jog and it gets into this region and beyond, I do believe it's going to intensify quite a bit more from where it is now. the track models. We
call these the early cycle track guidance, the spaghetti models. And this
is from this morning, the 12 UTC uh suite, if you will, and they're fairly tightly clustered overall. And you can see that none of them bring this directly into the northern Leeward Islands. And so that's obviously great news. But before we jump up and down and celebrate, we need to look at some other things. But this is what the cluster of
the spaghetti models look like. And yo
know, there's the global models to take into consideration, the Euro, the GFS,
the Canadian, etc. But this just gives you a snapshot of the overall envelope and before you say, "Hey, look at that one. That's that's going to save the day." So, what I find to be very interesting about this is that I posted that video on YouTube at around 3:00 on
the 2nd of September. I was going off of the 11:00 a.m. advisory package information there. There were no watches or warnings up yet for Irma, so we did not have intermediate advisories. and the 11 a.m. package. You know, I talked about this some in the update, 110 mph
wind, but the more important aspect of it was that the core of Irma was officially forecast at this point at around day four to remain uh let's call
it around 100 miles to the northeast of the islands of the northeast Caribbean Sea. And so most people felt fairly
comfortable with that. It didn't look like it was going to come barreling through there. There were just no solid indications of that just yet. As I mentioned in the video discussion, the spaghetti models were pretty tightly clustered on that scenario. Obviously, if you look at a lot of the ensembles back then, I'm sure there were plenty of ensemble members that went right through the islands. But the general idea, at
least from the 11 a.m. advisory package from the hurricane center, and this is over the weekend, by the way, Saturday, September 2nd, was that Irma's core, at
least for now, looked like it was going to stay fairly comfortable at a fairly comfortable distance away from the islands of the Caribbean. So, let's move
that forward 6 hours to the 5:00 p.m. advisory. And oh, guess what? It's now
closer to the islands. uh certainly less
than 100 miles now at day four that would basically be on Wednesday that it
would uh possibly you know pass much closer you know and people were starting to get more and more nervous and of course I'm talking about it on social media the buzz factor for this thing is really ramping up as you can imagine uh
at the 5:00 pm advisory top winds are still 110 miles per hour now let's go to the 11 pm advisory that night and the
overall guidance envelope continues to shift to the south and west and the
center is forecast to pass probably less
than 50 60 miles now to the islands of
the northeast Caribbean and it's starting to look like maybe this could threaten the southeastern Bahamas the Turks and Caos down the road a piece so

this starts to become more and more concerning as you could imagine Uh, and I'm going to save this image here, the 11 p.m. advisory image. And
it's funny, the first three pictures that accompany this episode are all hurricane center graphics because it was important. The intensity, we would all marvel at that over the coming days once Irma reached that incredible category 5 intensity. We'll get there. We'll talk about that. But um the track thing that

with with Irma was I think I felt like
and a lot of us did it's going to hit somebody and maybe even multiple somebodyodies. We just weren't sure exactly where of course but the pattern
looked favorable for this to strike land at some point and it could be pretty devastating. Large hurricane coming out of the deep tropics at the peak time of hurricane season. you know what could go wrong, right? So, um that gets us
through Saturday and then we get into Sunday morning, the 11:00, I'm sorry, the 5:00 uh package. Now, it's a major
hurricane. Uh top winds are 115 and the
forecast brings it by early in the morning on Wednesday, uh probably less than 25 miles from the islands of the
northeast Caribbean. and more and more
anxiety started really flowing through people down there. A lot more interest, a lot more people searching up information from the Virgin Islands and points east from there, St. Barts, Antigua. You could imagine, I mean, it was really becoming concerning. And
beyond that time frame now the official forecast has Irma, if you just extrapolate it out, it is aimed towards
southeast Florida coming through the Bahamas. There was still some talk and some concern that a trough, a little shortwave trough could erode the western part of the Bermuda High enough that Irma could turn up the southeast coast and do one of those Floyd type tracks or
an Irene type track. I mean, Hugo,
whatever. Um, you just name the hurricane that's done that. And there was some possibility. And certainly, because we're talking way out beyond 5 days, you're talking about days 6, 7, and 8. Probably. Yeah, that was a possibility. And people were asking me that on social media. Do you think it it that it could come into the Carolinas? Well, yes, it could. you know, and I don't want to ever be flippant about it, but you know, until it goes past you,
yes, it could still theoretically come your way under most situations. I guess
you know that you just you got to get it past your land longitude and your latitude. I guess I almost called it longitude. I guess that's a good way to combine it, right? Latitude and longitude. Just call it longitude.
But it was it was really starting to look more ominous for our friends down in the Northeast Caribbean. So, I want to catch up on things here uh on the Twitter timeline as well. We are now up to Sunday the 3rd of September. And my
engagement on social media, especially Twitter, was remarkable. Just a lot of
back and forth with a lot of people. the YouTube videos were getting many many thousands of uh views and it was just

the top of mind for a lot of people and
some of those people live down in the

northeast Caribbean as you could imagine. I was hearing from people from Antigua. Uh some of this would be on Facebook Messenger uh through the hurricane track page if you will on Facebook. I've got my personal Facebook and then we've got the hurricane track on there of course uh YouTube comments
and on Twitter. But remarkably, the the
most engagement and the most detailed info that I was getting from people uh was through Facebook
Messenger. uh several different people
started really taking advantage of that in a good way to communicate and ask questions and I welcomed that like that's part of my job that does not bother me you know I mean I do the best I can and when things start to get busy I have less and less time and it can become stressful for me because I don't want to ignore people you know wished I could uh be just everything everywhere
all at once as they say I think that was a movie right but I can't. So, I do the best I can. And at least now Irma's over the open ocean and I'm just working in the office just going through this kind of stuff or on my mobile device on my iPhone cuz everything's everpresent and talking about everything everywhere all at once. That's a mobile device for yo and it has its pluses and minuses. So, the plus side was I was able to stay in touch with people who had questions. And uh one of those people was a woman from Antigua named Daniela and she was very concerned about it and was messaging me back and forth on the Facebook Messenger. Then another came from St.
Bart St. uh St. Bartame and uh this was
a gentleman named Mirao, an Italian
fellow who had moved down to St. Bart, was working there with his girlfriend. I think they're married now, spoiler alert. But it was he, his girlfriend, and they had a dog and he lived on St. Bart or St. Barts, whatever you call it.
And he was messaging me, you know, and
um was very, very concerned. Had never been through a hurricane. What do I do if the worst happens? You know, people just were turning to me for uh
information, for advice, for, you know, a plan. Like, what do I do? especially people that were new. So, that was interesting. And then I also got um the
attention of a radio station down in the Virgin Islands and their very prominent host, this guy named Addie Otley, who
was a politician, uh was born in St. Thomas and got into
politics down there for many years. And he had this uh radio presence, like the number one show down there, uh in the Virgin Islands. and he found me on social media and then he was good friends of a guy that I knew from the Weather Channel who worked in the satellite operations division up at the Weather Channel in Atlanta. And the two of them were talking back and forth about, well, maybe we can get Mark on this Addie Otley uh show that he had.
And I mean, this guy was big. I'm telling you, like a lot of people tuned in. It's AM radio down there. uh
WSTA 13:40 a.m. is the uh station down

there. And so Addie got in touch with me
and um I was on the the show a couple
times doing these interviews over the phone and it got so popular over the

course of a day or two that he had me on
at some point and he said, "I want yo to know," and he said, "I'm being very serious here. if you were to run for governor uh of the Virgin Islands, you'd probably win. That's just like, you got to be kidding me because there just wasn't a lot of information, I guess,

you know, officially down there. And it was just odd, you know, that I became this big voice of info for the people of

the Virgin Islands. And uh it it led to
all kinds of folks discovering Hurricane Track and what we were doing and me specifically. And that was a really uh
neat thing. It it was to be able to help people like that. And they started watching my YouTube videos and the viewership would go way up and we'd have a lot of engagement and on and on and on it went. And you know it was good
because Irma was looking bad obviously

and you we're talking a major hurricane
threat here as we would get into the early part of the coming week. Uh this is now again the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, uh September the 2nd and 3rd.

And as we got into Monday, there's just something about getting into a new week. Monday morning, you know, the weekend is behind us. Once you get into early September, you're talking college football, school's back in. People are
busy. Labor Day weekend. I don't know if that was Labor Day. No, I think Labor Day weekend was the weekend uh the next
weekend, but it doesn't matter. It's just we're busy on the weekends and traffic to the website, to my YouTube videos, even with a big hurricane out there, is lower usually on the weekends
unless something's imminent to make landfall. But Mondays were always this big ramp up. People get to work. I guess they're wanting to be distracted a little bit, so they check in to see what Mark's saying and Levi is saying and
Eric Webb or Andy or whoever out there. and we get a lot more traffic starting
Monday. It never fails. Uh and this was certainly going to be the case as we got into that first Monday there in
September of 2017. Now, by the evening

time, just to make this clear, of
Sunday, September 3rd, the forecast
track had shifted enough, the 5:00 p.m. advisory. And again, all the images here
at the beginning are of uh track map

graphics from the National Hurricane Center site. This is the image number four. Uh hurricane watches are now up
for uh the northeast Caribbean Sea. Not
quite to the Virgin Islands, but um we're talking Antigua and St. Barts and
all those areas, Anguila or however yo say it. uh hurricane watch was up. The

uh Irma was now a major hurricane at 115
mph and it was forecast to get stronger
by the 11 p.m. advisory that evening.
Now, the last advisory before we got into the new week and all that I'll tell
you about after the break. Um still up
to, you know, still at 115, but Irma was poised to really strengthen and it was continuing. This is important this just
south of west movement. So it's losing

latitude uh ever so slightly. So if due west is
270° and it is then Irma might have been
moving at 265 or 263 you know just a little bit

south of due west because it had very
strong deep layer high pressure to the north and it's just shoving the hurricane south. The hurricane moves around. Uh remember hurricanes in the atmosphere, they're not solids. So it's not fair to say that it's like a block of wood floating in a river or an ocean current or something. It's not. It's a liquid, so to speak, a fluid, and it's
interacting with other fluids, i.e. the atmosphere as we know it. And Irma was
moving around these big areas of highs
and lows out in the Atlantic. And the dominant feature was this deep layer high that was expanding. So it kind of shoves the hurricane farther to the south. So it was losing latitude. And now the forecast was for it to come very
close within tens of miles. Uh so we'll
just call it less than 20 really to the northeast Caribbean Sea. And the new
week ahead, uh, starting again that Monday, September 4th, would be the
beginning of one of the most busy and
certainly influential weeks that I have ever had on social media for areas
outside of the United States.

All right, back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway continuing. We are now up to Monday, September 4th,
2017. And what a week this was going to be for all of us in the tropical
tracking world. Irma still a category 3
at this point. This is the 5 a.m. advisory package. We'll start very early here on Monday morning. I was probably up not too long after. Of course I was because school's back in session and I got to get the kids some breakfast and Rebecca and I getting them ready for school. And I would be a very busy man that week. That is for sure. Lots and lots of stuff happening. Irma poised to
become just this beast of a hurricane,
but we're not quite there yet. It had this little period where it was holding on at uh just barely category 3, but then it would explosively intensify and
become this incredible. Even on satellite, it just looked absolutely amazing um category 5 hurricane. So, what's happening out there? Let's look on the Twitter real quick. One thing on the 4th
of September, uh again, this is a Monday. All these days later, after
Harvey Carrie finally went over to the
Barker Cypress Road area near Katy,
Texas, into the Addex Reservoir, the
western portion of it. All that area was flooded several feet deep during Harvey's flood. And finally, the floodwaters had receded and Carrie went over to pick up the last of the remote cameras that were placed out there. And there's a couple pictures of it. So, I will save these for you. This will be the first photographs, if you will, uh,
of this episode. So, um, what are we up
to? Like six or something like that. These are different pictures of the camera box. One of them, this is I really like this. I appreciate that Carrie did this. He took a picture of it while it was still on the light pole at
this intersection. And you can see some of the mud and just the road is still just a little bit wet. Uh but the flood waters had finally receded. And then here's a picture of it. This will be picture number seven. And uh that's what it looked like in Carrie's vehicle. And
you look on there, you notice he was eating some Cheetos. Hey, the pictures reveal, don't they? Also, on the fourth, I should note, I tweeted as well that hurricane warnings were now in effect for portions of the Leeward Islands with hurricane watches now up for the British and US Virgin Islands. So, let's talk about that area just a little bit. The main areas that were we were very concerned about would
be Antigua, Barbuda. So you have Antigua
and then almost due north is the island
of Barbuda and then westn northwest from
there you have St. Barthalome or people
call it St. Barts and then you have the twin St. Martins the Netherlands version
which has two A's St. Martin and then

St. Martin from France. It's weird I know. Uh Philipsburg's down there. Yo
see those planes come in and land at like 10 ft above the roadway at one of
those locations. I think it's St. Martin with the two waves, but I could be mistaken. Uh then you have Anguila or
however you say it. And that is this kind of long island that goes southwest to northeast. This little slender Long Island, not Long Island New York, yo know what I mean. And then these are the areas that were really under the gun it seemed from Irma, but still a couple of
days away. So I'm still doing these
interviews on the Addie Otley show. my
YouTube views are in the thousands and that was again just to me um made me

feel good that I was be able being able to help people and the engagement was just constant whether it was emails or
YouTube comments or Twitter responses, Facebook messages, it was just constant
and I really felt like, you know, maybe
for the first time in my career, especially outside of the United States, that my experience and just the way I
analyze things and point people in the
in the direction of actionable information was helping people. Yo know, trying to bring a little bit of calm uh in the face of this growing danger and at least tempering some of the panic with again that word actionable, two words, actionable information. And that
was a really I felt like a a big responsibility and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed taking that on. So I I took that into consideration when I was doing my videos. I just felt like
uh this is an opportunity here to make a
difference. And we know we're going to have to deal with this eventually in the United States, but right now this is a northeast Caribbean problem. So that's what I focused a lot of my attention on.
So on Twitter again, it was a lot a lot of uh chatting with people down in that region. Um we had uh Daniela who was
sending pictures and videos. People from
Barbados were sending me and they were, you know, Barbados is way to the south. They're not going to be directly impacted, but they were getting big waves coming in. Um and then I had uh
this newfound friend of ours of of the
community of me, the hurricane track brand. I mean, I do I represent the brand. It might be my project, but we have a great community and it was starting to grow. Little did I know, right, as it would grow and and eventually it would lead to me meeting uh somebody who is a terrific partner of our project, and that's Brent. We'll talk about that. We'll get there in uh the next episode. Um but uh one of the
people was this guy named Miro uh Pharaoh, I think is how you say his name. and I'm probably not pronouncing it the way they do in Italy. Mira uh he
lived down in St. Bart with his

girlfriend, fiance maybe, and they're married now and they had a dog and um he

was messaging me on Facebook and lots and lots of anxiety. You know,
this is my first uh hurricane down here,
he said. uh he didn't have terrific
English so he was writing out as best he
could. He would send messages over audio

um and you know kind of I wouldn't say broken English but it wasn't wasn't like I'm talking to you now. It wasn't perfectly smooth as butter. So that was

really really interesting. And I could I could tell that this guy uh and his girlfriend fiance uh were pretty upset,
pretty worried. Now, they don't build houses down there out of nothing. I mean, they're cinder block reinforced. They got strong roofs. Um, you can certainly still get a lot of damage, especially in the deep tropics like that from what was eventually going to be a very powerful hurricane, but um it it
didn't you the fact that he did have a substantial shelter still didn't do
enough to temper his anxiety. I mean, he was pretty worried about it. And for
good reason, because as we move through Monday the 4th and then to the overnight hours and finally into Tuesday, let's just look at it. So, Monday the 4th at the 11:00 a.m. advisory, the winds are up to 120 and the track is now pretty

much right through the northeastern Caribbean Sea, almost right over those

affformentioned islands that I was telling you about, including St. Bart, very close to the Virgin Islands. Then
looking down the road a piece as we got towards the next weekend, it would
potentially be headed towards uh the northern coast of Cuba through the Turks and Caos skirting just north of the Dominican Republic and vicinity. All right, so that's the 11:00 a.m. advisory. If we move across now to the 5:00 p.m., now it's a category 4. Top
winds are 130. And again, it looks like
it's going to go right over those
islands of the Northeast Caribbean. And then finally, at the 11 p.m. advisory, top winds are 140 and it's still

forecast to just barrel right through the Northeast Caribbean, pretty darn close to Puerto Rico. Hurricane warnings are up for that area and it is aimed towards the Florida
Straits by the weekend, by Saturday,
that 5-day forecast. So, let's save this
image. This will be a good one to resume
the um saving of the hurricane track
maps from the hurricane center. Uh let's
see, six. This would be picture number eight. So, let's just label it that there. And my job was going to get more
and more intense because this was
becoming of the utmost seriousness. So, now let's go to 500
a.m. on Tuesday, September 5th. It's 150

mph hurricane now. Knocking on the door
of category 5. And just looking ahead,
remember we do have we have intermediate advisories. So they're the advisories are coming out every three hours. So the 11 a.m. advisory, this was it. It was up to 180.

And I remember uh the fear that of course that's a
solid category five. It's just like way
if there was a category six, this was knocking on the door of said category.
So, from a structural standpoint, Irma was about as classic as

you can get. I mean, it's one of those

posters of a perfect specimen like a
typhoon in the Atlantic, the stadium effect, eyewall, everything. It was clear down to the surface. Had these little mess vortices rotating around. All the energy compacted right there near the eye. I mean the outflow it was symmetrical. Very cold cloud tops.
Frightening. And this is one of the ones where you do need to be afraid of it. Lethal. And you know this is the kind of wind that can destroy well-built
structures. catastrophic damage,
especially those who were not as fortunate as someone like Miro or uh presumably Daniela. They

lived in good structures, pretty solid from what I understood. Addie Otley, yo
know, like he had a a good structure. The US Virgin Islands, which were now under more of a threat, hopefully most people would be okay. But there were those that didn't live in solid structures and they were
going to be in grave danger. So people

were starting to really ask me, "What do I do?" Like I I really need to know what
to do here. I'm scared. I'm scared for my life, my family's lives. And I was, you know, just kind of
going back and forth with some colleagues just to make sure that I could give the best advice possible. I spoke to my friend Stanley Goldenberg at the hurricane research division who himself had gone through category 5 Andrew with his family. You know what do
you do? What do I tell these people? And the the idea was you got to protect your
torso and your head. You got to put as much something cushioning I guess between you and whatever might be flying
around. You've got to keep blunt force trauma from happening. And here we are talking about this very little about storm surge or waves or anything like that. Anybody down at the water, Boers,
cruise ships, yachts, what you know, catamarans, they know what to do, I guess, right? We're talking wind here.
And remember, these are not flat Everglades islands. These are islands that have elevation. You know, these some of them mountains. and you go up two or 300 ft
and the wind is even stronger. It's unabated just coming right off the northeast Caribbean. And if you get in
that eyewall, and this was a symmetric
closed eyewall, look like a tire, yo were going to be in trouble. So, I was talking about this with Addie Oley very often. I'd do a couple of interviews. I was I was so busy. I remember I went to
um we call it lunch duty at my kids' school. My wife and I have done that for
20some years as part of our volunteering
at the school bare minimum, you know, that we and we do other stuff, but like once a week we'd go out for for lunch duty. And I remember different people
talking to me at school about it. They
visit these islands. Um you know, they
vacation there. they know these places. Oh, I go to St. Barts with, you know, our friends in the fall or whatever the case may be. And folks were very, very concerned because this was one of the most intense hurricanes we had ever observed in all of history. Recon was
just always stunning. And then it even got stronger. Got up to 185 at one point. And uh I I don't know. I mean, just what do you do, right? So, what do you do? yo you tell people the best advice, yo give them the best advice possible. So,
my main concern again was trying to make

sure that people saved their lives, like save yourselves. That was the messaging on the YouTube videos. And I've got one here that I did. Um, let's see what the date is. This is
the 910. I like it that I timestamped it. I recorded it at 9:10 a.m. because
things were changing so fast. This was at 9:10 a.m. Eastern time, September the 5th. Uh that's Tuesday, September 5th,
2017. Let's take a listen at uh it's 11
minutes long. Let's just play the whole thing. That's a rare opportunity that I get to do that and then we will come back and continue with the story of
powerful Hurricane Irma. Good morning. Hey, Mark with hurricanetrack.com here talking about Hurricane Irma. Now a category 5 hurricane with winds of 175
mph. Really not surprised by that because of the warm ocean temperatures, the rising upper ocean heat content along its path and the fact that intensity forecasting is where the least amount of skill lies. And this will fluctuate back and forth as Irma undergoes structural changes that are impossible to model and understand completely. They are the eye of a hurricane and the core of the hurricane I once heard uh as different and as
different as the weather is on Jupiter.
Very very strange goings on in the eye of a hurricane especially a category 5.
So, no surprise that it reached that intensity. And like I said, it's going to go back and forth, more than likely staying a four until landfall, assuming

it does over here or over here somewhere. And the only thing that would really impede uh its intensification back and forth between a four and a five would be any land interaction uh
especially in the greater Antilles over here. So, this is the current conditions as of 8:00 Eastern time and uh still
moving off to the west. Unfortunately, we need to see it gain some latitude. I'm going to look at that in just a moment. But you see your hurricane warnings in here for obvious reasons. Now, hurricane watch in effect for the
north side of the Dominican Republic and elsewhere downstream from here. Folks are going to really need to pay attention, especially the Turks, the Caos, and portions of the Bahamas.
Looking at the satellite imagery, the loop this morning. A very well- definfined eye. And the last couple of frames, slightly less organization overall, and that's part of that inner core structural change that'll take place without warning. And you see how the deep red has sort of faded out. And now there's just this one curved band of red there. And this will just go back and forth uh with time. That's really,
you know, worrying about whether or not this is 140, 150, or 170. At this point,

it's academic. The winds are strong enough to cause catastrophic damage either way. And certainly 175 is a lot
different than 150 or 140. But I don't want you to be basing your decisions uh
over here in the islands on what category this is. That's very, very foolish. That's just like saying, "Uh, I
know that I'm going to get hit head-on today in traffic, but I'm not going to wear my seatelt unless I think it's going to be a head-on collision of 40 mph or higher." You would never say that. And the same should hold true with this because it is moving right now
basically due west at 270° or so, uh,
just south of 17° north latitude. And
what we really want to see, and I'm going to zoom in on this very tight, we really want to see this gaining latitude. And unfortunately, it's not doing so. There's the 17° north latitude
line right there. And then over here is
60° west latitude, and you start to get
into your islands of the Caribbean right over here. All right. So, there's Guadaloop. So, luckily, it is north of Guadaloop's uh latitude. But then you've
got, you know, the different islands of Angua, you know, St. Barts, Antigua,
they're all in the way there. And if we look at this map here of the region, uh, these are the areas that I'm talking about. Antigua and Barbuda, uh, I think Monserat and Guadaloop probably going to be okay in terms of escaping the core, as will hopefully be uh, St. Kits and Nevice. But these are the areas through here. Let me paint in yellow the areas that I am the most concerned with and that would be right through here. Uh and
you know St. Kits and Nevice maybe I'm going to include it just we don't want to say hey you're safe. Uh we really need to see this gaining some latitude and right now it's coming in about like this. And what we needed to see it do to save, you know, people is for it to gain a lot more latitude than that because that's going to put the core of the hurricane through some of these islands later tonight and into tomorrow. Uh, and we're going to have to just basically watch this when I do these updates. Uh, looking at models and trends or whatever when it's this close, not as helpful as what's actually going on with the
hurricane. All right, so here are our islands that we're most concerned with. And here is the hurricane still to the eastsoutheast of those islands and it's going to have to start gaining latitude uh to miss them with the core. Now the hurricane force winds extend out 45 mi from the center and the tropical storm force winds extend out 140 mi from the center. And you can bet that as this
buzzsaw looking appearance gets closer as this whole mass starts to move through, obviously the wind and the rain will pick up, the seas will become dangerous. And you need to finish everything before the sun goes down tonight. And be ready to protect your head and your body with as much padded
material as you can in an interior room like a bathroom or a closet. Put as much
building between you and the wind. yo know which way the wind is blowing in uh that you can and you need to protect your head. Seriously, pillows, you need to build a bunker. Uh if this is coming your way and you expect the core to come over your area, you need to be ready for that. Uh we're not playing around anymore. This is and we never were, but this is absolutely serious. All right.
So, let's look at the modeling because I know that after the interaction with the Caribbean, uh, northeast Caribbean islands here, a lot of interest obviously Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and then downstream from there. So, looking at the 6Z run of the GFS, this is initialized at 2:00 a.m.
Eastern time this morning. Uh you see the hurricane coming through and it passes very close to if not right over
some of these islands in here and then it makes its way comfortably enough uh
far enough north of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to hopefully escape major damage, but then it plows right through the southeastern chain of the Bahamas, the Turks, and the Caos. and then on a path uh towards the Florida Straits. And I ran this out to day 6, 144 hours. I figured, you know, we can
look a little bit farther out in time, but I'm not going to do 7 8 9 or whatever because that error is just ridiculous. Okay, so day six, I'm willing to go a little bit farther out in time or further out in time as it should be, I think. Uh and and look at the 6-day forecast. And as you can see on the 6C run here, uh it it starts to
turn northward earlier than we've seen lately and it comes into uh Miami date

into Broward County. All right, so that's sort of a change that we've seen from the overnight runs and what we were seeing up through yesterday and last night. So let's just go to that last frame at day six here, 144 hours out.
the center would be just off the coast here, not far from Melbourne, it looks like. Is that a trend that's getting ready to start? Maybe. We'll just have to see. Uh the European model and a lot of the other modeling is out this way. My biggest concern in terms of Florida
outside of the wind impacts which are obvious is and I mentioned this before is if this comes through like this and then turns north like that uh then yo have a massive surge that's brought into southwest and west of and western Florida uh on top of the wind damage. So
this is just horrible. There's no way around it. You need to be watching this like your life depends on it because it very well may. All right? So, pay
attention, start listening, and maybe focusing in on more public officials,
less social media chatter. You know what I'm saying? I'm, you know, just try to filter the noise down to people in your
local area, your local weather person, your local weather radio. Uh, and I'm
going to talk about more about where to get this information as the time comes. The hurricane local statements, which are not up yet because there are no watches or warnings for the US just now, but there's a lot out there and it can be very overwhelming is my point. So, just I don't want to say relax cuz how can you, but take a deep breath. We have
time in the the downstream areas, the
Bahamas included. Okay? and we'll see how things work out. Uh just a reminder, you know, people can follow on the app anywhere you go. Uh right there, that's what it looks like. It's called Hurricane Impact for iPhone. There is an
Android version, but parts of it simply don't work because it hasn't been updated in 3 years. We just haven't had the funding. Not very many Hurricanes to generate interest, and that is the way it goes. The blog portion certainly works on the Android version. uh but other parts of it have lost functionality due to updates within Android itself. So we have focused on the iPhone version as it tends to be more popular anyway. That's the icon. It's on the app store and everything we
do goes into that app. All right. All of the video updates, the live coverage, you name it. Our Twitter feed is baked into the app, so you don't have to go to Twitter itself. uh just pointing it out and you know it's just four bucks and it helps us and I'm hoping we can help yo so far from social media. I I'm hearing very good things and I appreciate that and it's nice to know that we're making a difference. You can also help out uh on Patreon and PayPal. Just going to
mention it real quick. Don't want to always talk about the business side of things, but I you know I work. This is my job and this is how I get paid is from you all uh serving a public interest here. So, uh getting this finished up at about 10 after 9 Eastern time. We'll have the afternoon model runs that come out. Actually, they come out in the afternoon, but they're based on morning data. Uh it gets confusing, I
know. Bottom line is I will have another update late this afternoon around the 5:00 Eastern time advisory package from the National Hurricane Center. I want to focus on the advisory packages from here on out and then focus on what model data
is around those advisory packages and then we start zeroing in on impacts. By
the way, that's why the app is called Hurricane Impact because in the end that's what it's all about. All right. So, I'm going to focus on the impacts and timing, and we're going to really zero in on our friends down in the
Caribbean, uh, that are under the gun from here until about 24 hours or so, maybe 36 from now. All right, that's it
from me for this morning. Yes, there's other things boiling up in the tropics, but no, they are of no consequence to anyone right now. So, let's deal with one thing at a time, and I think a category 5 hurricane is enough for the
time being. I am Mark Sith for hurricanetrack.com. Thanks as always for tuning in. Your time and attention is much appreciated. I'll be back with another update between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Eastern time today. So clearly Irma was a terrifying

hurricane and there's not very many that we can say that about. You want to reserve the hyperbole for when it's
absolutely needed. And this was one of those situations. Katrina comes to mind. Ike with its extraordinary catastrophic
surge back in 2008. Camille 1969,

Andrew. There's just a few where you can say this is a terrifying, very dangerous, lethal. Yo

know, you need to sound all the alarms, everything. There is no hype at this point. It hypes itself. At least yo hope so. And it was really looking grave

for our friends down there in the islands. So, you know, again, by 11:00
it was at 180. The 11:00 a.m. advisory.
Let's fast forward to the 5:00 p.m. advisory. It's up to 185 and it is forecast to pass through

the Northeast Caribbean like a direct track through there. And I I just think
it's important to save these images. cuz I know they're on the hurricane center site, but we might as well save them here as well. Um, let's see. What are we
up to? Picture nine or something like that or 10. I'll sort it out later. But these are all going to be there for yo to check out. And just look at that. The track barrels through there. All those reds. That's hurricane warnings. Hurricane watches now in effect for the southeast Bahamas, Turks, Cikos. And as

much as I'm focusing back then and even
now in this episode, the first episode of two here on the Irma saga, most of
that emphasis is on the Northeast Caribbean for obvious reasons. But we are starting to see a direct threat to
South Florida at this point, and that would be coming in the next weekend. In
fact, the five-day position 2 pm Sunday
was almost over Key West or very close to it as a major hurricane. It depended
on interaction with the greater Antilles, of course, but for the time
being, we were very much focused on our friends down there in the Northeast Caribbean. So, as the night of the 5th

uh began, you know, the afternoon faded into the evening and then finally into pure nighttime. I would be literally
engaged with working with this guy and
uh his dog and his girlfriend down there, Mirco. And I'm going to tell yo all about that. Like, this is riveting stuff here. I got to dig up some things off the hard drive. uh this portable hard drive. I saved a bunch of Facebook messages. It's actually in the documentary. And I want to mention again, I do and have produced these
documentaries. I called them back in the day. Tracking the hurricanes. Tracking the Hurricanes 2017, of course, has the Irma chapter. And all of this is baked
into that. And uh good storytelling, good music. Irma is one of the best edited ones that I've ever done in my opinion. um I narrated it and uh so
forth, but I'll put a link to it when I post this on Patreon in case you have never seen it. It's a great documentary if I may say so myself. My perspective and the stories of all these different people. Um but yeah, that evening because I told Mira, look, I will get on
the phone, so to speak. I mean, I'm literally going to use my phone, my iPhone, and I'll do Facebook messaging
with you and even uh some audio back and
forth as best I can to help you and your

girlfriend and your dog survive. And
that's that that was weird to say that. I'm going to help him survive. Like, I felt like I had a a
vested interest in this. Now, I got to see this guy through. And now luckily uh down in Antigua it
wasn't looking quite as bad. I did get some video in. Oh, that was the other thing by the way is the ability for folks to send me video and then I could download it and then throw it on social media and then it would end up of course in the documentary. Daniela from Antigua
sent video. It looked rough out there. The hurricane sky. But also in all of
this, I want to make sure because there there's like multiple threads in the timeline going on here. I'm also having to think about when do I leave for
Florida that's coming. And I had to keep
my eye on that ball. You know, this is
like a juggler. I'm trying to keep an eye on a lot of balls in the air. Some people say it's like spinning plates. You know the the u entertainers that
they spin the plates on top of a pole. How many plates can you keep in the air at once? That's it's tough. And so I have to make sure I'm ready. And I got the old Tahoe there. And uh these will be some great pictures to share as well with you. Uh I tweeted out, let's see what time this was. 3:41 in the afternoon. It's getting late in the day there. It's almost go time for people
down in the islands. Ah man. And I I just I never will forget that feeling like I'm all the way up here in Wilmington, North Carolina and I could feel the anxiety of what they were going through down there in the islands and I'm couple thousand miles away or whatever it is. I mean it was really
grave like and I told the family I have got to immerse myself in the office just
pretend like I'm gone because I've got to get these people through this as best I can. keep that information going out,
you know, and it was just I felt like it
was a duty of mine. Um, but at the same

time, I had a responsibility to make sure I covered it properly in the United States. And part of that would be to make sure that the Tahoe was ready. So, I took it over to my good friends at Aspen Tire who had been taking care of
the vehicle. All that they could do, anything outside of the engine and transmission, they did it. Tires, brakes, you name it. Tuneups. So, I took it over there and I posted a couple pictures. Uh, just a great group of people over there. I've known them for almost 20 years. And, um, let's see,
eight now. This would be like picture number 10. And uh a couple pictures
here, 10 and 11. There's the old Tahoe there and a little little ad for Aspen Tire and Auto as well. Uh but it's important to note, this is where it's even more relevant. The tweet is Tahoe
getting prepped by the good people at Aspen Tire Pros here in Wilmington with

424,000 miles. It needs TLC.

Irma would be the last hurricane mission

that the Tahoe would ever go on. So, there's that. Uh, and we'll cover nothing catastrophic happened, not like a wreck or something for those of yo that might be wondering what happened. But, yeah, it would be the last mission uh for a a hurricane. Uh, and we'll get to all that in a future episode. So, that's the late afternoon. Um, again,

just constant contact with Miro especially. He sent a video from me and
um, I was very worried about his location as was he, as was his dog and
his girlfriend, believe me. Um, so we get to the evening and um, Irma was out there and as if that was not enough, uh, we had TD number 13,

but that was all the way over in the western part of the Gulf of Mexico. Um,
and it went on to actually become Katya, by the way. Um because we already had

um Jose uh out there. Uh HIG, right? Irma was
the eye storm. We had Jose and that was
out in the open Atlantic. And I I didn't even mention that before, but we did have to watch for uh Jose down the road. It was way out in the deep tropics. But now we've got potential Katia in the western Gulf. The tropics were just lit, as they say. So, we finally get to the
evening hours and the sun is going down
in St. Bart as category 5 Irma closes
in. They could take a direct hit. That's what I was saying on the Twitter there. And uh at 6:25 p.m., so be about what
are they on Atlantic time? So, maybe they're on the same matter, but it was certainly sunset. And I'm going to share this picture with you. Picture number 12. Wow. Uh, I mean, and I remember this
just like just like it was yesterday, all these years later. One of the last amazing photos, and there's just a bunch of them here. I'll share these with you. This is picture 13, I think it is. Look
at these photos from St. Bart. And these are the pictures that uh, Mira had sent to me as the sun had set. And it was

just not good. You know, I really felt
bad for what they were about to go through. And not like I caused it obviously, but like this was going to be terrifying. And it is going to happen at night. Like how unfair could that
possibly be? You know, couldn't happen at 1:00 in the afternoon where you can at least see. No, you know, it happened
at night and it was just

beyond comprehension. I mean, like really? So,
I committed to staying up uh as late as
it took overnight to help Mirao get

through things. And I told him, "Yo
have got to create like a safe room."
And he told me about his house. It's concrete block, whatever. Good roof, but
it's up on a hill, so that's not good.
And so the winds are going to be even stronger up there. Um, so I said, "Dude,
you got to get pillows, mattresses, and you got to build a safe room, and yo got to protect your head, get some helmets if yo can." And I even talked to my wife about it. You know, look, you're in the emergency department. What What do I got to tell these people? What are my, yo know, I mean, common sense would say protect your head, but Rebecca said, yo know, you need to tell them to also make sure they protect their torsos. You just don't want that blunt force trauma. Yo don't want to be pierced where you're bleeding out, rupture your spleen. I mean, this was serious. We're talking like what? that this was so like it was

just bizarre that I was even having to address this and the fact that I was doing it for people in another country. It was surreal. So I put everything I
had into it. Stayed up late. The midnight oil would be burned which would start to drain me but
whatever. I would sleep later. That's the way I looked at it. So I told him
Mirao look you got to build a safe room. and he sent me pictures and I am so proud to be able to share these with you. Uh I'll share all of them. This is pictures 14 through 18 and you can see
what he did. Different pillows that was in a bathroom. Uh and they had the mattress in there and mattresses plural. Yeah. I

mean actually through pictures through
picture 17 if I can get the words out.
So much to tell you. That's the thing. It's just uh riveting. I mean, I'm
remembering all of this. So, they're uh as ready as they can be
and um Irma's closing in 185 miles hour,

this absolute um perfect eyewall, the whole bit, yo
know, and remember, we're also watching

to see what happens later.
and the models are starting to waffle a
little bit and most of my attention of course focused on the Northeast Caribbean at the time, but we're we're almost to the point where obviously we're going to have some impacts in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, but then
we got to start focusing on the Bahamas and Florida and maybe at least according to the GFS up into the Carolinas because
there was a run or two where it would turn that infamous track that these things sometimes like to take when they come around the Bermuda High and they cut up the east coast uh by way of the southeast and further refining it by way
of North Carolina. And sure enough uh
that's what it looked like it it might do at least on the operational GFS. So
let's check in on the track map from the hurricane center. Um the 11:00 advisory

that night, uh winds were still 185 and Irma was knocking on the door of Barbuda. It
eventually went right over the island of Barbuda. They were in the calm of the eye. Very violent passage of the eye and

then it went over St. Barts. And now
we're after midnight, so we're up to September the 6th. and Mirco Pharaoh.
The tweet was a picture sent to me just now from Mirco um Pharaoh. Stupid Twitter. Uh back then
it wouldn't let me edit, so it it autocorrected to
micro. I swear I think my last name Sith
gets misspelled. Poor Mirro. I'm sure
he's been called Micro. And he's not a
small dude. I've seen pictures of him. He's a big Italian fella. He's not micro anything. Um, but anyway, Mira sent me a
picture and folks, this is extraordinary. It really is today and it
was back then. I mean, he sent me a picture of his barometer, his weather station. And look at that. The air pressure 928.2 millibars. This is picture number

18. 928.2. He's up couple hundred feet

probably above sea level. So you could probably say it was 930 whatever yo
know cuz he's up a little higher. So the pressure is going to be a little lower. Two things come to mind. First, wow, that's really really low. That's lower than I think I've ever been in. Uh I
think the lowest would be Katrina. Maybe

I was at 937 in Gulfport if I recall.
Um, so yeah, this is lower than I because Charlie was in the 940s. It was just such a compact core. The wind speeds were really high, but the pressure was only in the 940s. So, I
think that uh, you know, that's the lowest pressure I'd ever seen somebody report and certainly lower than anything I'd ever been in. And the fact that he's able to send it to me. And this wasn't a week later. Uh, in fact, let's see what time that was. This is uh now 5:00 in
the morning. I had stayed up uh all
night keeping in touch with him on uh

Facebook. Now, I want to read you some

of the Facebook messages that he was sending me. So, we get to 5:00 a.m. here
and the air pressure is at 9:28. So, let's talk about some of the
uh conversations that he and I were having as things build up. So, I'm going to dig these up off the portable hard drive. And after this musical break, we're going to go through these very personal and somewhat frightening somber
messages that uh were shared from Mirao.
He, his girlfriend, and their dog down there in St. Bartholomew as terrifying

uh Hurricane Irma moved through.

Heat. Heat. All

right, back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway continuing as we look at Hurricane Irma now closing in on
the northern Leeward Islands, the Northeast Caribbean. Before I get to
what I call the letters from Mirao, these uh exchanges that we had on Facebook Messenger, and then I'm going to read some stuff off of Twitter back in the day, back when all this was happening. Let's take a look at the 11:00 advisory package from the National Hurricane Center from the public advisory. The headline, again, this is 11:00 p.m. Atlantic Standard Time, which is the same as Eastern Daylight Time, and this is Tuesday, September 5th, 2017. The headline was potentially catastrophic. I mean, anytime you hear that word, you just know. Anyway, potentially catastrophic category 5, Hurricane Irma getting very close to the northern Leeward Islands. The pressure was 916 mibars. The winds were 185 mph.

It had this perfect round eye radar
signature around it that we could see from the Netherlands and Tilly's radar. Just truly extraordinary, frightening. Uh you name it. And speaking of that region, it was 50 mi east northeast of
Antigua. So it was going to miss them, the core, but unfortunately it was also
50 mi eastsoutheast of Barbuda and it was moving at 285. So it's moving west
northwest 15 mph right towards Barbuda

and eventually St. Bartholomew St. Bart.
And that's where I had my new internet friend at the time. had met him at the end of August from a message he sent me on Facebook Messenger thanking me for all the information I put out and he was keeping an eye on Irma. We'll get into that in a minute, but that's the setup. That's where we are. Now, if we look at Twitter, um I was also talking about all
all of this that evening. I said on a
post on Twitter, let's see what time this was. Try to get the real time facts. 11:16 p.m. I posted a video
discussion regarding Irma and it was
coming. I mean, it was going to be moving through the Northeast Caribbean. All eyes were on Barbuda and then eventually um St. Bart and then Anguila
and the US British Virgin Islands, maybe Puerto Rico. and then this would re
really become a problem for the southeast United States with uh of course Florida being in the crosshairs first. So let's jump over here. I want to take a look at some of these uh different messages that I got from Mirao. First one was back on August
30th while I was still wrapping up the Harvey mission and uh Irma of course was
already on the map. we all saw what was coming potentially. And so Mirro sent me

a message through the hurricane track Facebook message uh or maybe it's my personal one, doesn't matter, but uh this was August 30th in the evening. He said, "Thank you for keeping us informed." And I said, "Oh yeah, you're quite welcome." He said, "Yeah, thanks a lot. I live in St. Bartholome. What should we expect for next week with Irma?" And of course, we all all now know how that uh turned out. we would expect the worst as it as it would seem.
And uh he said he's got a house in the hills. Um I said, you know, yeah, it's a category 5 now. This is September the 5th, so obviously several days later. And I said, I'm very concerned since your house is up in the hills. You know, they're going to be exposed to a lot more wind up there and you need to put uh as much between you and the hurricane as possible. you know, like mattresses, pillows, what have you, and get into an interior room like a bathroom. And he said, "I am preparing a bunker." And I said, "Yes, that's what you need to do." So, Irma is closing in uh the night of

the 5th to the Northeast Caribbean. We're all watching. It's It's very scary. And I'm really worried about this guy because I feel like I know him a little bit now. Um, at one point I said,
you know, maybe, just maybe, uh, it's
going to pass just to your north. He's like, well, is that good or not? I said, well, that's good overall, but you know, we're talking wobbles and stuff here. I said, if that happens, you know, at least you won't go through the north eyewall, which has the translational speed somewhat baked into it. There's some debate about that, that when you're in that right front quadrant or the hurricane is coming toward you, that yo add the forward speed. Not necessarily,
but it it probably doesn't hurt or whatever. It doesn't it doesn't subtract. Put it that way because sometimes the back eyewall can be worse. It's just a matter of how organized the hurricane is. But we were watching all
these different wobbles and everything. And it passed over Barbuda late in the
evening. We were all watching in horror. Barbuta was squarely in the eye. And I
was like, I think it's coming right for you at this point. So, the fifth is obviously going to flip over into the sixth at midnight. And I am getting some

different uh messages from Mirao, staying in touch with him. He had taken a nap and I'm trying to find this just random messages I've got from him. Uh he had taken a nap, he said, um and uh for
a few hours anyway, which was good. You're going to need all the wits about you, right? And he said um it's amazing.
it's increasing. I was like, you know, here we go. And this is getting towards 2 or 3:00 in the morning. And he said, here I am. You know, this is it. He's there with his dog, his girlfriend. They got helmets. And by the way, he sent me pictures of their setup and I will share those with you uh in this episode when I post this on Patreon and on Discord. So,
I said, "Yeah, it's it's very close now. The worst part should be there any
moment. you know that eyewall is going to come crashing through and it's going
to just be really bad. So, few more different messages here. This is now again around 2:00 in the morning. He said, "For the moment, we still have electrical power and we are protected by the mountain. The wind is blowing over us, so they're not getting direct flow." He said, "We will see tomorrow uh when it will turn from the west, but for the moment, it's okay. I've slept for about 4 hours." So, I had taken a nap as well. Uh, and I saw this message
and I responded to him at about 4:30 that morning and I said, "It's coming right at you. Be very careful." He said,

"It's really increasing." So, then I went and got a satellite picture cuz we didn't have a good radar site really anywhere near him uh that I could show.
And so I grabbed an infrared satellite shot that has the different, it's from Tropical Tidbits and it has the different islands, the different geographic landforms are on there. And I
put the cursor, the little mouse thing, pointer, whatever you want to call it, and it looks like a magnifying glass cuz it's just a still image and I was using the zoom feature in Firefox and I put the magnifying glass or the basically the cursor right over St. Bart and I
screen captured it and I sent it to him. I mean, he had to know. I said, "That's you." The circle in the cross. And of course, it's coming right at him. And his response was our good friend. The
four-letter f-word is, "You can't blame
him." And I said, "Yeah, you know, how are things now? Worse, the same?" He said, "The same, I think." Um, you know, how many kilometers an hour of wind? I said, "It's still category 5." you know, so you could see 160, 180, 200 in gusts.

Like, it's bad. Like, I wasn't going to, you know, sugarcoat it at all. I was like, you and your girlfriend and your dog, you guys have just got to stay in there and keep yourselves protected. And, uh, he was very, very frightened. Uh, he said that. He said, "I'm scared." Um, I said, "I'm scared for you." um
just looking through some of these different um uh posts that he sent. I
said, "Is it loud outside?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Please, if you can describe or send me a quick video." He said, "It's impossible to do that. We're in the bathroom." I said, "Good. Get under those mattresses and keep your heads down and protected." And there would be a few minutes that would go by and I'd say, "You still with me?" I mean, this was riveting. I was up 4:00 in the morning now that that thing is closing in. It's got to just be insanely
loud outside like Charlie for me in 2004
but bigger and louder cuz it's down in the deep tropics and it's still dark. So
I said, "You still with me?" And he said, "Yes." And uh then he said, "It's really increasing." And he said, "I'm scared." And I said, "I understand. Yo know, just follow what I'm telling yo and you'll get through this." And he's like, you know, tell me, tell me again. like he wanted me to keep talking and to kind of uh uh reassure him. He said, "I'm really scared." I said, "I am too for you, but follow my advice and yo will survive." And he said, "Tell me." And he sent a picture again of the mattresses against the walls and pillows. And the fact that we were being able to do this back and forth during the eyewall, the approach of the eyewall of a Cat 5 hurricane was in and of itself extraordinary. and and I just my
pulse was racing. I remember this so well. Um then he started sending
pictures of the barometer and I started
sharing those on Twitter and cuz this

was extraordinary meteorological information. So the first one was at 4:58 a.m. and the air pressure was 928.2

millibars. Probably a little low because
they were up on a mountain. uh you know not a thousand feet up or anything but several hundred feet. So uh the pressure
at the surface at this point in time maybe 930 931 something like that and

the uh hurricane core pressure was the
center of the eye was apparently around 9:16. So they still had about 18 millibars of pressure to go in about 45

minutes. So that's a pretty steep gradient as you could imagine. And I tweeted it. I said, "A picture sent to me just now from Mero Pharaoh, the gentleman on St. Bart. Incredible to see this." And then uh a little while
later, um he sent another one at 501. So

3 minutes later, the pressure is down to 9:25. Air uh the temperature, by the way, was 27.2 Celsius, which is about 81. So it's warm and muggy. And um I'm

up, you know, I'm up like putting this out on social media, staying in touch with him as best I can. And uh the eye

finally goes right over them. Uh and I

uh get this message. I'm trying to see where it is. Um he said that, let's see,

cuz he said it's here. Let me find it. Um here we go. He said it's amazing. It's increasing. uh very loud outside.
And then he sent me this. Let's see if I can find it. He said it stopped like boom. And I know how that is, especially when they're down in the deep tropics like that. That very clear cut off. It's a pretty rapid drop. He said it stopped.
I said, "Please send me a picture of the barometer." And I couldn't figure out the time on it, just the way he sent the photo, but the air pressure was down to 924 millibars. And that was the last I heard from him. They were in the eye and I was like, yo know, hey, you still with me? What's up? And time went by. I thought, all right,
don't panic. They're probably okay. I mean, he's in the eye. And they he was able to send that to you. They made it that far. Go to sleep. You know, you got
to get ready. Is talking to myself here, right? You know, you got to go to Florida soon. You'll hear from them. Uh,
and so I went to bed, slept for a little
while, got up on the 6th, and didn't
hear anything back. Damage reports are coming out of the region. Um, you know,
just I had a bad feeling, but I thought at the same time, dude, they sent yo stuff or he did of him and his girlfriend and their dog situation in the eye. That's got to be a good sign. Eventually, the communications are going to go down. Uh, but I was definitely thinking about them. So, we get into the 6th and there was some guidance shifting

that morning that said, and this is a really interesting tweet because we now know what happened. So, hindsight is always interesting. Let me see what time I posted this. Now, we're up to uh what is this? Wednesday the 6th. Um 6:41 a.m.

I was up early and uh I said, and this
is one of those famous ones, it's not that I got it wrong. It was the guidance. You'll see. The overnight model guidance has shifted and seems to suggest less of a threat to the Florida
Keys and the southwest coast of Florida.
Uh well, we all know how that turned out. And then I said, "As a result, it appears that the east coast of Florida and then north towards Georgia and the Carolinas would be under an increasing threat." And in fact, the hurricane
center graphic at that time uh did have,

let me go back to the graphics archive because I want to save this as we get ready to wrap up this episode here. Uh
at that time the graphic put the five-day position of Irma as a category
five right on top of Miami. And I will
never forget that. That was just incredible to see. Waiting for it to load up here cuz for a while as it was approaching the northeast Caribbean, the track carried it just north of the greater Antilles and into the Florida
Straits, the Keys, etc. And then as it
approached uh the islands and made landfall, Barbuda and then of course over St. Bart, the very next uh frame

was a major hurricane category 5 on

Sunday right there in Miami. And I'll save this image for you. That is a track map plot that uh we will never forget when you get a category 5 plotted pretty much right over Miami. But then that's day four. Day five curved north and it

was back out over the ocean um east of
Daytona roughly and or maybe just southeast of there. But the bottom line it looked like it at at least this advisory package, this was the 11:00 a.m. advisory uh on September the 6th,
that's a Wednesday, it looked like Irma could just skirt the east coast of Florida and then maybe come into the southeast. So, I was trying to figure out if I'm going to stay put in the Carolinas in Wilmington, and maybe this does come up into South Carolina, North
Carolina. We've seen them do that before. Floyd 1999 was a great example of the uncertainty and how close it's going to get to Florida before impacting the southeast, north of Florida. But now we're up to 2017. Computer models should be a lot better than they were in 1999. the forecast uncertainty is hopefully much less. Nevertheless, seeing that
plotted as a category 5 uh right over
Miami and I want to make certain that you know I note here that it was forecast to be a larger hurricane. So the wind was not forecast to be 185 but
about 160 I believe and then a larger
overall wind field as Irma got into the higher latitudes it was going to expand. the energy was going to spread out over a larger area and that would mean that even if the center did not pass exactly
as forecast there on day four over Miami, they would feel some pretty nasty conditions as Irma's windfield would expand. But this particular advisory package and that tweet that I made uh in the early morning hours there of Wednesday the 6th, it did look like the threat to southwest Florida and the Keys was starting to diminish. And boy, this would be a lesson, I tell you what, in windshield wipering and and when a hurricane affects the Florida peninsula from the south north, uh that that would
really we'll get to that uh in the next episode when I begin my trek down to
Florida. Eventually, that would happen, but we're not quite there yet. Uh we're on the 6th and uh Irma had smashed

through the northeast Caribbean and was
now headed toward areas like the US British Virgin Islands. And some of these images that I was able to capture on radar scope. I remember that afternoon. Uh this was Wednesday and I
was out at the school again and I was sharing with some of the parents. We were talking about Irma, uh, some of these radar scope images and I'll save
these for you as well. These are just remarkable as, uh, Irma was closing in
on the Virgin Islands. Um, you know, St.
Thomas, St. Croy, you got Virgin Gorda was just getting into the northwest eye here. 1209. This is the San Juan radar.
You got to see this picture. It's just remarkable. One of those ones. It's got this little spike, this little area of like a little mess vortex that's sticking out like a almost like a barb
into the eye. And you just imagine that the violence in there must have been
unbelievable. And then at 108, just an hour later, this perfect circle of convection, this eyewall, very intense,
passes over St. John and then eventually
is going to head towards St. Thomas uh Charlotte Amaly was just outside the eyewall but Roadtown in St. John is in
the eye. And little did I know, and actually I didn't know at all, but as they say, little did I know that a gentleman named Brent Lynn and his family, I think at least his sister, were going through this down there in the Virgin Islands. And he had found me on YouTube and other social media, I do believe. And he knew who I was, even though I didn't know he who he was just yet. This would be my introduction where
the universe said, "Okay, Mark and Brent are going to get to know each other because of Irma." But again, what an amazing and by the way, if you don't, who is Brent? Who's he talking about? He is one of our great friends of the project. And starting in 2018, he would come up and start helping out. And we will get to all of that. But that's uh Irma is what brought us together so to speak and introduced us to each other uh in such a calamitous
way, right? Um so Irma goes through the
Caribbean. It goes just north of Puerto Rico. I know I saved one of those screenshots. Yep, I sure did. And then it kind of starts to take on like a a

different look. It was just north of Puerto Rico, um just northeast of San
Juan. And what an incredible shot. This is 6:30 in the evening there of
September the 6th. This is image number 21 or something like that. I don't know. I have to re number all these later. Just make sure you look at all of them. They will be in chronological order once you look at them. That's for sure. There's a lot going on with this episode. But man, that image of just a
buzzsaw of a hurricane with your inner
core that looked like a perfect circle of convection with a lightning bolt in the eye. That's just phenomenal. And then an outer wind maxima starting to develop as well. Irma was going to expand. The windfield was going to get bigger and it was headed toward Florida,
maybe turning up towards the Carolas. In fact, at um 123 hours out, the GFS is the 18Z

run. I'll save this picture, one of the last ones of this episode. It the GFS brought it right into Charleston. I mean, or certainly the low country, if not right into Charleston, just south of it. And that's even worse. And that was just 5 days
out. But again, 5 days is a long time.

Your track error at five days can be a
couple hundred miles or more on an official forecast track on a consensus model and certainly an operational
global model. But already I'm asking
people on social media, do you know anybody or do you have property on Tybee Island, Savannah, you know, Folly Island, you know, down there in the low country. And I'm thinking I might just sit right here and wait for Irma to come
up into the southeast. Especially like I didn't want to leave because I did that for Floyd. I went down with my friend and colleague Eddie and we got down to
Jacksonville cuz we weren't sure how close Floyd would get to Florida and I didn't want to make that mistake again. And I mean, it was worth every bit of it because the Floyd saga was of course one
for the record books as well, but yo
know, conserving my energy, conserving time, and being more prepared, if it's just going to come into the Carolinas,
why go to Florida first? And that answer
was not immediately uh known. It was not obvious as of yet.
So, let's fast forward the advisory package to 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday and

Irma is now still forecast as a major
you cat five right over Miami slightly more west now and then it
it just clips southeast Florida and then it aims towards the Savannah River Valley. So you're talking Savannah up to
Bufort and eventually Charleston and that would just be catastrophic. The surge would have just been 20 30 feet. Like this was really like so many people
were watching this now. It was beyond
belief. So before we wrap this episode
up, I think what changed it for me, the
11 p.m. advisory, I mean still not a lot

of clarity. It was a little bit more east. It was like, you got to be I was pulling my hair out. What do I do? But
by 11:00, I thought, okay, it's probably
going to impact South Florida somehow.
You can't miss that on the way down. If
it is going to directly impact South
Carolina, the Low Country, and whatnot, you can do just like you did from Matthews. Again, me talking to myself, you got to do that sometimes. Um, I
could deposit cameras. I only had five at the time, but I could put one in Charleston and put that big old battery
pack in there that would let it run for 3 days and head on down to Florida and put all the rest of the assets down there. So, I at least decided that on

Thursday the 7th, I will leave for Florida. That's that's final. what I do
when I get there or will I, you know, we'll let the rest, as I like to say, be up to fate. We will let fate decide. And in this case, fate's name was Irma. But
as of the 11:00 advisor, and I'll save this image as uh the last one for this episode, and it is an extraordinary one for sure. Um, category 5 hurricane

skirting the east coast of Florida, coming up into right into Savannah there. Uh, and actually it weakened, at least on the official advisory package, down to not a category 5, which is good.
But nevertheless, the Southeast was looking at a potential absolute worst case scenario of this powerful large hurricane rolling
up the coast of Florida, piling up that surge into the areas there in the low country of South Carolina. But first, I had to figure out, is this going to impact an area where more than six
million people live? And we call that southeast Florida. That would be my first target, my first decision as to
what to do and how to cover that. And we will do all of that in the next episode. All right. So, good good place to wrap up this episode. We got Irma started and
all the way through the islands is now north of Puerto Rico. So, literally a good jumping off point for the first episode of this saga here. All right, so next time around we will start with my
trek down I95 on the 7th of September
and all of the many adventures and lessons learned and oh my gosh, all the
stuff that would happen in the the coming days of how Irma eventually did
impact the entire Southeast in ways that
a lot of us never even would have imagined. Uh, and again, a lot of lessons that I would learn about our project and what we need to do in the future. We'll cover all of that and more in the next episode of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. As always, thank yo for tuning in. I am of course your host, Mark Suta. Thank you for listening and I'll be back with you real

soon. Heat. Heat.