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 to you again and welcome to another edition of Stories from the Hurricane Highway i am your host Mark Sudith very excited to have you with me
the first of two monumental episodes as
we begin to unpack the saga of Hurricane
Harvey in this episode everything
leading up to the landfall in Texas of
what would be a category 4 hurricane
breaking the drought not since October
of 2005 had we experienced a true major
hurricane landfall in the US harvey would break that streak this will all be covered in uh this episode and then the next episode will cover the second part of Harvey which of course was the catastrophic just mindblowing flooding that took place across a good part of eastern Texas into
Louisiana and I just I can't wait to tell you some of these stories my side of things the stuff that I saw and experienced and felt um especially after
coming off the incredible emotions of the total eclipse back there

on August 21st so that's kind of where we begin so I finish up the eclipse as I

talked about in the at the end of the last episode i race back home safely of
course pack everything up and I'm aiming
to go ahead and make my way to Texas because I just had this feeling looking at the guidance looking at the pattern looking what the modeling was showing and just going on experience too that sometimes these hurricanes only need two days and they can really really ramp up
and my fear and I certainly echoed this in my video discussions was that once the remnants of Harvey passed over the Yucatan I
thought that there was a really good chance that they could really regenerate the conditions were going to reverse from hostile to very very favorable and
we could be looking at an intensifying hurricane all the way to landfall but none of us I certainly was not sounding
the alarms that we were going to be looking at a category 4 and that is exactly what happened harvey strengthened all the way to landfall and I believe it set off this chain of many

hurricanes not quite consecutively but certainly a lot of them in the in the years since 2017 of intensifying hurricanes all the
way to landfall along the Gulf Coast
region so where again up to the last

third of August the eclipse has come and gone and I had to like shove it you know

like I really I had to just compartmentalize those memories as amazing as they were i had to put that away and get everything I could pack
ready to go now luckily it was not an insane amount of stuff i had like five I
think of these remote camera systems that we we were using the Logitech broadcaster cameras they were fully operational now and they were you know the boxes were a little bit larger than a lunchbox i think it's the IM

2075 Pelican case or whatever it is storm case um so they're not giant by

any means and they take a couple of batteries each and then I had a couple of weather stations that I was going to take with me and remember I want to remind you that the weather station situation in 2017 always been trying to
figure this out it's just you especially wind data is so hard to capture so in
2017 the plan was the animometer the RM

RM young animometer would be perched on a mast a 1-in pipe four or 5 ft tall uh

made out of steel like a steel pole basically and the animometer would be on top you know secured and then you would
basically splint for the lack of a better word the mast with the animometer
on it to the vertical I-beam of a bridge

and I figured there was enough bridges out there that had uh steel railings
that we'd find something to basically like I said splint the thing to using a combination of zip ties and Gorilla tape because I've said it before I'll say it again when you layer Gorilla tape yo
get a big fat roll of it and you layer it over and over in several different spots i mean it's it's almost as strong as welding and I dare you to prove me wrong i mean it's definitely going to hold in 120 130 mph wind when you secure

it against an I-beam again like splining
one finger to another finger if you ever broke a finger or whatever that was the idea and I do believe I was taking two of these with me um down to the Texas coast so I had all that packed up i had um my handheld
video camera it was like a Sony Handy Cam um and then of course my iPhone and
various little battery packs and whatnot and uh my suitcase with several days
worth of clothes and uh my little foam

memory foam pillow and I think it was did it have a Spider-Man case on it i can't remember i think it was one of my kids pillow cases um and I and I know
this because it showed up in a couple of my videos like when I would ever start a camera um or I shot a video you could see the pillowcase i just I remember that and a couple people commented on it I think on Twitter at some point hey nice Spider-Man pillowcase or something whatever it was so I didn't have like an
insane amount like it's more now these
days that I pack up because we have more equipment uh less is more literally we have evolved so that less is more everything's smaller but we have more of it but yeah back then in 2017 it was not

a tremendous amount but I didn't want to forget anything and I wanted to make sure I did the best job that I could now one of the aspects of this trip of this field mission and this is really important i was very excited that I was going to be able to stream live on YouTube
natively through the YouTube app from

basically start to finish if I had a signal uh I would be streaming to YouTube and so what I did is I took an old iPhone i don't remember what model it was cuz it might have been like a 5S or something it's one of my older iPhones that I was no longer using so it's you know it's kind of a dead iPhone i'm sure there's a a term for it uh but you know the Wi-Fi still works it it just doesn't have a plan it's not yo know there's no phone part it's basically like a brick or an iPhone with
just Wi-Fi so it's kind of like an iPad yeah I guess that's a good way to put it so I would have this iPhone and I had this little holder with like a very
strong alligator clamp actually it was like a gooseeneck thing for GoPros and then I had this little iPhone or smartphone holder and I retrofitted it all up and I would run the iPhone through my Verizon hotspot that would be
the internet for the iPhone so I would literally pair the iPhone to my Verizon
hotspot in the Tahoe remember in 2017 we
are still running the original hurricane track venerable legendary Chevy Tahoe

it's got the weather station on it yo know all those hundreds of thousands of miles whatever and I was really excited
to stream live the whole time as best I

could because I had been wanting this
like man being able to stream directly to YouTube grow my YouTube audience
reach more people I just thought that would be uh certainly beneficial across
the board and I was very excited about doing that so that's one seed as it were
that I want to plant for you um that I
was really excited about doing that now the other thing a lot of different parts here okay Carrie and Todd so Carrie

Mallerie and Todd Pale both good friends

of the project good friends of mine personally just two outstanding gentlemen as it you know stood anyway right they're just great dudes but they also were helpful in the project and they were becoming increasingly so uh those two guys were also beneficiaries
of watching the eclipse and they did it in Wyoming and I remember texting Carrie
like on the way back on the 21st i was like "You and Todd get some sleep i
don't know Walmart parking lot whatever you got to do and then I need you to start driving back because Harvey's coming and I'm coming and he's like "Really it doesn't look like I know it doesn't look like much." I was like "Trust me it's coming." And I remember
too speaking of what it was looking like the satellite presentation of the remnants of Harvey josh Morgan likes to say "These things look like scrambled eggs they're just all jumbled up." And he was looking at the modeling too and I remember he tweeted this picture uh back
then we didn't have generative AI where you could just create stuff out of thin air but we did have old GIF images and JPEGs just sitting out on the internet i guess now you can just think it up and it's there what a world right but in 2017 you could find stuff you know stock photos whatever and he tweeted this zombie hand kind of reaching up out of a
grave with a moonlit background deal at
night very spooky looking again this hand coming up and it said Harvey is that you and I remember thinking when I saw that I was like yep like I think this is coming back so it was all hands on deck I'm going to be ready I had this feeling ladies and gentlemen I just cannot convey to you there's only a few times this has ever happened really where I truly thought I know more than
everybody else like like you know yo
don't know for sure and you're not going to go out there and say I know more than you but I felt it and I tried to translate that to the best of my ability through video updates that I would do without coming across as being arrogant but um I just had this really
deep-seated feeling that Harvey was going to be uh potentially a really big
deal for Texas you know historic no yo

don't know if something's going to be historic i mean maybe once in a while and and we get to Irma I think maybe changed all that but we'll get to Irma later um but I really was very focused
on the Harvey mission and because I did I had this feeling like this is going to be one that we remember for a long long
time so the Taho's packed up i'm ready to go and I did a couple tweets late at
night on the 21st got some sleep yo know after the eclipse that day there was a lot going on I'm telling you and um yeah it's hard to sleep it really is but I got a few hours i got up and I did a video discussion on the 22nd before I left um and I know I tweeted about that
i wanted to to see and of course I'm talking about it in you know on social
media that man the computer models especially the GFS really getting aggressive with Harvey's remnants and so forth so I published a video discussion
uh let's see what time I did this this is before I left uh 2:18 p.m i love the
timestamps forever always on there i love it helps me keep up with everything so I published a um a video discussion on the YouTubes there uh outlining my ideas for what I'd do for the field mission and of course the latest on Harvey and then I'd hit the road so let's take a real quick listen here as to what I was talking about way back there on the afternoon of August 22nd 2017 for today August 22nd 2017 some

pretty strong warding coming out of the National Hurricane Center now for what's the uh remnants of Harvey whatever yo want to call it it's going to be Harvey all right it's it was Harvey and it's going to be Harvey again and here we go
so this is the uh 2:00 update satellite
images indicate that an area of low pressure over the Yucatan Peninsula associated with the remnants of Harvey has become better defined during the day environmental conditions are conducive for development when the system moves over the Bay of Campichi tonight and a tropical depression is expected to form over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday or Thursday and move in the general direction of the Texas coast on
Friday interest in northeastern Mexico and along the Texas coast should monitor the progress of this system as it could produce storm surge and tropical storm or hurricane force winds along portions of the Texas coast and very heavy rainfall across portions of central and eastern Texas from Friday through the weekend this is serious now it really is

all right it's going to not leave a lot of time for people to get ready it could develop rapidly especially close to landfall we have seen this system these types of systems before uh this is not
hype this is not trying to you know yell
fire in a crowded theater nothing's a guarantee but this has the look of the potential for being a big problem so I
got the video produced online shared it was ready to go packed up the Tahoe finished up everything I needed there and it was time to tell the family goodbye uh two of the kids out of the seven were up in college already they had missed the eclipse because of that i talked about that but uh yeah they were Nathan and Cole were already up at college so their their classes began on Monday the day before here this is the 22nd of August that I'm talking about and they went back to school on uh Monday the 21st when the eclipse happened and um I think the rest of the kids started later that week i always hated still do missing their first day
of school if I can help it but in this situation I couldn't help it harvey was going to be a big deal it looked like and I needed to be ready for it so the next part of this is the journey uh the
drive to Texas and my first leg I'm
leaving kind of late in the afternoon on the 22nd of August and um I'm going to
drive to Atmore Alabama it's just a little bit north of Mobile maybe an hour something like that maybe less and um
then I drive the rest of the way down to the Houston area on uh Wednesday the 23rd now at the same time Carrie and Todd they're trying to get back to Texas from Wyoming where they witnessed the eclipse so we're all trying to converge back in Houston on Wednesday probably Wednesday afternoon or evening maybe even Thursday morning and go tackle
whatever Harvey brings at us that's the plan so it's going to be me with the Tahoe and all the gear and then Carrie and Todd are going to be there and um we'll have Carrie's truck and we will all work together and do the best we can so that was that was the game plan so this next part this journey here to get to Texas I'm very excited about because
I'm going to be doing it live on YouTube for the first time ever uh again I've
said it you know already setting this up earlier that YouTube finally enabled

live streaming to the YouTube system uh
through their app and it's still hard to believe that they didn't already have that i mean Facebook Live had already been around a year or two people could
stream live on Twitter they were using what was it called periscope or something you had Vine i don't think Vine was live though was it i don't think so and of course we had been streaming live on the internet um since
2005 so you know come on we had a 12-year jump that is hard to believe that I was streaming live on on uh the
the internet you know our site now it wasn't public because we couldn't afford to do it publicly because well until we got to Ustream but you see what I mean everything's just kind of um this was going to simplify it that was what was going to be nice about this because we started doing it in '05 using Windows Media Encoder and we would stream to a private content delivery network that's what it's called a CDN and we had to pay for it that's the reason that I had to create a whole new site you know because I had to control how much this would cost it was never about trying to make money that came later when I had to reinvent everything and survive the the loss of the Lowe's sponsorship and so forth and as the project evolved streaming live on YouTube was a big hope
like man if we could ever stream live on YouTube I think we could grow a bigger audience and we could find more people that would be interested in supporting the project as well as of course just
introducing what we do to a lot more people uh you know the weather geeks out there we want to try to find those people so this was a really really big deal this this um ability to be able to
stream directly to YouTube through the YouTube app so the Taho's packed i'm ready to go i'm sitting out in the driveway i turn on that iPhone it's a little secondary iPhone that I had as I me mentioned before and uh it's paired up with the Verizon hotspot everything looks like it's ready to go and I'm ready to hit the road so what I want to do is I want to play a few audio clips

from the journey there uh I don't know
what it was eight or nine 10 hours that it took me to get to AppMore and surprisingly and I was very pleasantly surprised the YouTube app did great and
literally it was and it still is today it's right in the YouTube app you didn't have to get another app there was not a live streaming app separately yo literally would go into the YouTube app set it up create the description a title whatever set it to public versus unlisted or private and of course I wanted mine public and it would go out to the YouTube ecosystem and it turns
out it was a really really good idea and I'm going to talk about that as we go forward uh but it would definitely help to grow our presence on YouTube and
eventually the growth of our Patreon and
it led to where we are today it's quite a remarkable thing so here's a few clips though as I made that drive from Wilmington North Carolina the very first time streaming live directly to YouTube through their app you can literally hear me as I'm on my street uh and then I'll play a few samples from there as I made my way over to Atmore Alabama

hey everybody just putting the finishing touches and then we'll put it up here where you can see everything and we'll get
rolling first thing we got to do is go get

gas then I'll put the camera up

here for the long trip to
Alabama see you but bye

house hopefully I've got everything I

need it certainly is lighter there's
just more of it
what if What if

it drifts northwest towards Texas and here's something to look
for that it never makes it to Texas it comes up and then it's slows down dramatically and then starts moving east without making landfall then it could head over towards Louisiana
and and that would just be you know New
Orleans does not need any more rain nobody needs it but I mean my goodness so do not discount the possibility that
this never gets to Texas that it comes up and the steering

currents collapse it sits there and then

it starts moving east again never know so I find it kind of
interesting that I was already mentioning the collapse of the steering currents as Harvey regenerated at least
it was forecast to and you know the possibility that it could really slow down and there were some hints in the modeling that maybe it would never make it to Texas uh but this was really the beginnings of those clues that it could
be a really big rain maker and we were starting to see that with the uh slow
approach to Texas the fact that some of the guidance was indicating that maybe it would never make it to Texas and maybe turn more to the northeast and eventually make landfall in Louisiana um
all of that started to kind of come together and you know manifest itself there on the 22nd into the 23rd in fact
as I was traveling along I got into Alabama made a stop uh before my hotel
took a look at the GFS and it was really
starting to hint at this potential massive rain event for Southeast Texas to the point where I said um you know took a look at the GFS and I may have to
stop at a Bass Pro Shops on the on the way to Texas you know obviously tongue and cheek there but going to need a boat at this point cuz it was really looking very serious uh post landfall uh
assuming that Harvey did make landfall because again I want to emphasize it was not clear that Harvey would make it to Texas this uh steering currents were very weak they mentioned that in the different discussions from the hurricane center and it was not a given that it
was going to just come ashore and that would be that typically what happens is these hurricanes move across the Gulf they make landfall on the southern side of some big high pressure over the continental United States and they generally barrel inland over the Rio Grand Valley or if they're further south it'll be somewhere over the mountains of Mexico and if they're a little bit more north into Texas they come in and they rain themselves out as far west as San Antonio the Hill Country and sometimes they even curve around the backside of that big high and the remnants can end up in Oklahoma or elsewhere that's usually what happens well with Harvey it
was looking like this was not going to be usual uh and there was going to be many many aspects to this event that were indeed very unusual so I saw that
run of the GFS the ZeroZ GFS for the
23rd and it was indicating this
potential for a lot of rain and the alarms are starting to get sounded about that and uh it it was really problematic
so the other thing is I wrap up this block here the first day of travel uh for the Harvey mission uh I keep emphasizing the YouTube app and how excited I was and as I wound down the
first day of driving here the goal was to get from Wilmington North Carolina to Atmore Alabama and I did just that it
was great so YouTube did fantastic it
was the first time I'd used the app to stream natively i've said it many times already I know but it worked and I was

very very impressed with that and I and I looked at the stats on it and you know for 2017 numbers and stats or whatever

we had a little over 5,000 people it's like 5.5,000 people views I guess I
recount that uh tuning in and that was
pretty good considering that there was no thumbnail for it the headline was on
or the title was on my way to Texas to
cover Harvey or something like that there was not any like live hurricane chase you know there was no flamboyant uh trigger to get the algorithm to to put it out there yet somebody told me I

can't remember where I saw it if it was on Twitter or in a YouTube comment but I
do remember that somebody said pretty
soon after I started driving that day that I was the second featured live
stream on the YouTube homepage so I thought that was really interesting that Okay cool and you know but even yo think about as great as that would be to be on YouTube's homepage 2017 there's
not as many people tuned into YouTube as there are now there were a lot don't get me wrong but anyway that was just really cool that I I guess I tripped the algorithm just enough to be on the homepage uh for a little while and again you know maybe 5,000 people something like that tuned in and I got a lot of
comments and a lot of feedback on Twitter and that was exciting but it worked it did really well and when I would pass through areas where there was low bandwidth uh the stream would
compensate and become pixelated sometimes it would kind of freeze the frame but the audio would keep going but by and large it worked with very few dropouts or gaps at all and it recorded
for 11 hours and 55 minutes i didn't
realize back at the time that anything over 12 hours gets sort of not cut off

but it won't save it it's just some weird YouTube thing so like if you've got a live cam of like the beach or that

that southernmost point down there in Key West or a deer cam or something there's all these nature cams you have to go in and stop it in like 11 hours and 59 minutes and you know 30 seconds or something and it saves that file then you got to start a new one i didn't know that so I got really lucky that the trip
only took 11 hours and 55 minutes and a

few seconds whatever uh because I remember I turned off the stream uh just
shy of the hotel cuz I wanted everything shut down i wanted to just get in and get some sleep and I want I will play that ending audio for you my sign off as it were and then we'll go into a really quick musical break and then when we come back after that we'll start the second block and my continued trip towards Texas for what would be Hurricane Harvey good night David i'll be there at the hotel in a little bit streaming again tomorrow afternoon about 1:00 p.m eastern

21 minutes till hotel
time thank yo

David 712 minutes of continuous

streaming

heat heat

all righty back with you now stories from the hurricane highway continuing we are up to the second day of my journey from North Carolina to Texas for what was going to be a very powerful and destructive historic memorable Hurricane Harvey uh looks like I got up around 10:00 in the morning something like that central time my hotel there in Atmore
Alabama and remember that's just north of Mobile maybe an hour probably less
than that but almost to Mobile Alabama i
got up I took a look at everything and uh lo and behold the hurricane watch was posted for portions of the Texas coast by this time and by the way we're up to August 23rd that's a Wednesday 2017 and

Harvey is back as at least a depression
no longer just remnants now officially tropical depression Harvey once again and the forecast was starting to get pretty aggressive they even mentioned in the discussion here in fact I think this is going to be the first or second photo that I save i think the first photo
should be the uh that big hat there in South Carolina i forgot to do that earlier so I'm going to do that now yo know you know what that is right the I95
it's a very famous um landmark if yo
will tourist trap but yeah that'll be the first picture that was from day one of my travels but I wanted to save that cuz that's part of part of the history of the uh the journey for Hurricane
Harvey there but the second photo that I'll save for you is more of a screen capture and it's important because it's a little snippet from the forecast discussion in which the forecaster says and I quote here "This forecast agrees
well with the guidance all of which shows a quickly intensifying cyclone approaching the Texas coast." End quote
and that is a big deal because they also say although not explicitly forecast below and they're talking about in their numbers the 12 24 48 72 hour and so
forth the specific time frames there
although that's not you know part of those numbers um they are anticipating
that Harvey would be a hurricane at landfall after the 48 hour forecast point cuz all the guidance was just much more aggressive so I'll save this little image again it's a little screen capture that I did and I circled I don't know how I did that i must have done it on my laptop using like paint or something who knows um but I really wanted to circle that part there where it said that the the forecast agrees well with basically an intensifying cyclone all the way up to landfall and that's important because when they strengthen all the way up to landfall that is a really really big deal they are much more dangerous when they do that so that got the the juices flowing for sure uh all kinds of people
paying attention to this as you could imagine and that puts a big wheel into motion once the hurricane watch goes up they were forecasting four to six feet of storm surge for parts of the uh area that was under the watch there was a storm surge watch as well remember we had those now in 2017 more products from
the National Hurricane Center storm surge watches and warnings and you know Harvey was it was
coming and so was I i was going to be heading in that direction so I packed everything up at the hotel my bag whatever and uh hit the road drove south
out of Atmore to Mobile again west there on I 10 fired up the YouTube once again
on the uh that iPhone I think I've mentioned it in the stream it was like an iPhone 5S i guess it's like an older
iPhone that I had um and I must have
upgraded to like an iPhone 7 at this
point i don't know those are details that may or may not matter but it was nice to just be able to turn that thing on and stream again through the YouTube app and uh make my way westward and also
it was really nice to just be able to interact with people that really does help break up the drive it keeps me alert um whether I'm making a stop or if
traffic's real thin and I can just glance down real quick and look at the chat or something and you know there's ways to do that and you can still be completely safe uh it's just it's true
you can and we live in that age you have to just figure out how to deal with it and I knock on wood I've done just fine
never had a problem and it does help to keep me alert i really think so that's a long drive looking at the stream itself the archive of it um by the way the
title was live Harvey coverage as I head to Texas and no thumbnail or whatever
the fancy stuff like we try to do now uh but it you know 13,000 different people or views i don't know how that works but whatever it says 13,000 views 7 years
ago that this all happened uh that's pretty respectable for way back then when YouTube streaming from their app was not ubiquitous not everybody had that um it was just starting there in 2017 as I've already mentioned but
that's a long drive it says it was 8 hours 14 minutes and 1 second so yeah I
mean if you know that drive it is I mean just from Baton Rouge to Lafayette across the Achafallayia that's 17 miles that bridge what a feat of engineering that is right but what's interesting is as I was going Harvey just never seemed

like it was going it was doing much yo know like there was this pretty aggressive forecast and I had it in my mind all right we're going to see it start to organize on satellite and that the next advisory it'll probably get bumped up to tropical storm i mean there was just something about that word that term tropical storm versus tropical
depression um and it it like it didn't
happen and I remember the intermediate advisory that afternoon they issue those when you have a watch or a warning in effect uh still a tropical depression in fact if we look at the graphics here I will save the 10:00 a.m graphic let's
see how I can do that there it is
um so this is picture number three it's
literally the forecast track map from the hurricane center from that first advisory where it regenerated from 10:00
a.m central time Wednesday top winds at
that point in time were only 35 mph but like I said the forecast
uh was for this to intensify and become a hurricane as it came ashore you know I've emphasized that a couple times now I realize but that led me to believe that ah this is going to start ramping up quickly you know and it wasn't it was
really weird and if I just look through the images here at the intermediate advisory which is at 100 p.m central time Wednesday I'm on the road by this point still 35 mph and it was stationary

i mean this thing was just very annoying because it was hard to figure out what was going to happen um and you know we
want to be able to put confidence in everything and sort of we feel like we are we are in control even though we're not and uh you know I had all this equipment I needed to set up i needed to know what's Harvey going to do you know Carrie and Todd are coming from Wyoming from seeing the eclipse themselves and they're trying to get back to Houston safely and quickly and uh it it was just
I remember how stressed I was like I want to be able to see Harvey doing what
we expect it to do and it was just a very slow process as those hours ticked
by and as I'm just driving along it just I remember how anxious that made me feel
because also there was all this hype
about it and that's a very appropriate word here uh certainly from me cuz I I
said in my updates you know how I thought this was going to really intensify and you know you don't want to ever be crying wolf as they say you know if you look at the guidance and yo think it's going to be strong you want it to be strong just because you want to make sure that the science is right yo don't want people to start doubting yo so it's a weird thing right like if yo say it's going to be something it better be and uh and that works for the weak side too if you forecast something to be weak and it ends up being really strong
you also can lose the trust of the public that way and we've been burned on that in the uh the business over the years uh where something luckily nothing real short a couple of examples i mean I'll kind of jump back a little bit look at 2007 with Ombberto right off the
Texas coast there near Highland very small tropical cyclone but you know it was forecast to just be a a minimal storm and it ended up being like an 85 mph hurricane um and you know way back

in time 1935 now certainly that was before any reliable technology like we've got now so there's that but yo know the most infamous example is the Labor Day hurricane of 35 that was a tropical storm at Andros Island and then
went through the southern keys there in the middle the middle to lower keys as a category 5 uh the strongest hurricane intensity-wise every bit of it you can think of in US history so it does happen
both ways you know where something is under forecast or it's overdone and we
just don't like that you know nobody likes that nobody wants a big powerful hurricane but if you say that one is coming and everybody's getting ready for it you kind of expect that to be the
case so as I drove along I just remember
seeing Harvey just like "When are yo going to start organizing what's going on here?" Um so I move along through yo

know the what I call the flat plains of Southwest Louisiana uh and it is really
flat out there when you once you get west of Lafayette you go through areas like Jennings and eventually Lake Charles and then you starting to at that point to get into the industrial prochemical areas out there uh eventually once you get to the Texas Louisiana border you have Orange and uh
Bowmont Port Arthur which brings me to a
pretty cool thing that happened i was
going to be able to finally meet up with one of our longtime friends this gentleman named David um and uh leave
his last name out because I didn't yo know clear this with him so to speak probably wouldn't mind but we'll just leave his first name up for now uh we were going to meet for dinner uh he lived and worked in the Bowmont Port Arthur area had been a longtime fan of what I do and a great community member of our project and um we had emailed
over the years and eventually uh started texting back and forth um he was very
well engaged with the weather community and keeping an eye on all kinds of stuff from severe weather to hurricane season especially and there was always you know
the invitation from him if ever you have time coming through for anything would love to meet you and maybe we can grab a bite to eat somewhere and finally uh as I drove towards Houston this would be the opportunity so I stopped at uh a
Longhorn and yes no surprise there right
and uh David treated me to dinner and I
remember how stressed I was at this
point because I'm trying to go back let's see you had the 5:00 p.m eastern
or 400 p.m update and it's still the depression and I'm going to save this image as well cuz I want you to see this uh this is image number four I do believe so Harvey yo
know at the 400 p.m central time or 5:00 p.m eastern uh forecast package still a
tropical depression and I'm thinking like is this just going to end up being not what we were thinking and again you know me enough by now i don't root for big hurricanes to come in and plow into these communities but if it's forecast to be and it ends up not being I cannot tell you how frustrating that is for everybody we can all agree now at the end of the day that's a net positive because nobody has to deal with a big powerful hurricane but it's a blemish on the forecast process the communication i
mean we really don't like that you know and it's very simple if we think and we forecast something in the industry and it doesn't come to pass it's a real problem and uh you know so it is what it
is but the fact that it was still a depression and only moving at 2 miles hour was frustrating because I'm like what is happening with this thing and I remember it did not look healthy on satellite and I was tired it been a long
3 days really think about the eclipse on Monday and I really didn't even 4 days
honestly let's go all the way back to Sunday the 20th you know getting ready
for the eclipse and what a big deal that was going to South Carolina staying at
this uh family's property that had never met before but they were very nice of course I already talked about that didn't get a lot of sleep the eclipse is coming harvey's out there so that gets us into Monday the 21st the eclipse happens harvey is on my mind you know it
wears you down so I remember having dinner with David and he was probably like "Man Mark you going to be all right?" Cuz I definitely looked haggarded now the upshot is I'm in uh

Bowmont Port Arthur area or it's actually Bowmont proper where we ate and
it's only the evening time uh and uh
like I don't know seven eight o'clock whatever it's not late we're not rolling in to dinner at like 10:30 or whatever
they probably close at 10 or 11 anyway and Houston's not that far away so I wasn't going to be getting to Houston at some ungodly hour and then I had to get up on Thursday and be I'm still so exhausted so there was that but I do remember uh not feeling my best i just didn't have the enthusiasm like what's what's
going to happen and that's a big part of it is the uncertainty you guys have to deal with with a forecast i have to deal with it
as well in terms of where to put the equipment um to be the most effective

and it is such a challenge it's that's one of the hardest things to translate through either this podcast or
in documentaries you know that it's not just a willy-nilly well let's just put some cameras up and see what happens it is a very purposeful meticulous process because we're trying to figure out where mother nature is going to bring the the most wrath right and that's hard to do and

let me tell you something about the Texas coastline it is not something that
you just drive like Mississippi you got Highway 90 and you can just plop equipment down from Pasigula to Beluxy
to Gulfport you know past Christian Long Beach Waveland Bay St louis it takes a
few hours but it's basically a straight line more or less pretty easy same thing
for the Florida panhandle which I would learn firsthand in 2018 we'll talk about
that later there's areas of the country my point being uh our our coastline that
are easy relatively to put the cameras
out and it's just one after the other and just move along texas is very
difficult because there's all these bays
and barrier islands and very different

access ways to get there it's like the Outer Banks of North Carolina you can put stuff on the Outer Banks which is
the strip of barrier islands roughly from you know the Virginia North Carolina border south to Hatteris and Ochre Coke but there in there in lies the problem with the Outer Banks it's a straight line but if you want to get to Ochre Cook you got to take a ferry and then if you want stuff on the mainland side on the other side of the Outer Banks um Newburn Washington and eastward

out into some of those peninsulas along the Albamaral Sound or the west part of the Pamlico Sound or whatever man that'll take you all day
so there are areas of the country that are exceedingly challenging and the Texas coast is definitely that and
trying to figure all this out to do the best job that I can plus we got the weather stations you know I want to get the wind data the pressure data there's just a lot that goes into this and I
think that David could see that on my face i wore it as they say and plus I
was tired all right so that was the 4pm
update and then of course they had the 700 p.m intermediate advisory 700 p.m
central time and this is about the time that I would have been rolling in maybe a little later than that to Longhorn to
meet with David and sure enough I'll save this as well just to prove it it's still a depression 35 miles per hour and
uh it's still moving at two and I literally like I can see it in my head and I remember telling David like "This thing's still a depression what if it just never strengthens you know like and I'm coming all this way i got all this energy and it's kind of for nothing." Boy was I wrong right uh but I I
remember that i remember how confused I was and just like "What is going to happen?" And I have to imagine that a
lot of people in Texas probably were thinking the same thing all right we got this hurricane forecast for us um this
is Wednesday evening and it's forecast by Friday evening that's just 2 days away and it's still a depression like what it is hard that communication part of this business uncertainty and so
forth that is very very difficult
nevertheless great dinner with David wonderful to have finally met the guy um and he is still such a good friend I've uh had dinner with him since fast forwarding many years can't remember it's a couple years ago Uh he has since moved to San Angelo he's retired uh him and his wife just terrific to hang out with and I value that friendship very very much um one of
those occasions where meeting somebody that you've never met before that you've only known over the internet worked out very well cuz he is such a great guy him and his wife um I can't say enough and I
love that part of of this job i really do uh especially when I'm on a mission
and people are worried about something like this and they can meet with me and we can talk about it in person um it's just a very special thing so I finished up and um shook hands with David and off

I went and it's a pretty quick drive more or less from uh Bumont you go
through Winnie and then you get into the greater Houston area and I remember
driving in it was nighttime now um I'm
not sure exactly what time let's look at the Twitter and see if that offers any clues as to when I might have arrived at
the hotel there um no I don't see too much there um cuz

I didn't do a lot of tweeting that day because I'm driving so that makes sense right um and you know Harvey was just kind of putting along as I've discussed but I get to the hotel again it was not very late at night um and I think I'm
going to do like I did in the last block there and play some of the last bit of
audio uh before I do the next musical break and we get into the third block of when I arrived in uh the area of Houston that
I was going to stay in and this is important because little did I know that

the hotel that I chose it was a Hampton Inn once again over on the West Park Row

area kind of near Katy so you got I 10
that comes out there you go through the energy corridor all that and um what is

the there's like a is it Memorial City or something like that there's this really neat little um I mean Houston is enormous it is if
you've never been there it's amazing just a sprawling big old city with a central business district comprised of skyscrapers and big hotels and the convention center down there and the NRG stadium or I think that's what it's called and then you've got like these satellite cities if you will around Houston that in and of themselves could make a decent city anywhere else in the country and one of those is called Memorial City and I mean it is beautiful
you drive through there at night and it's got these tall buildings pretty much either side of I 10 headed west and they are outlined in this blue neon and it's just really neat looking and I remember driving through that thinking you know man this hurricane that's coming it's not a hurricane yet but it will be we all know that um this is
going to change things and the rainfall
parameter was really starting to show itself more and more in the guidance and in the wording from the National Hurricane Center and I just was thinking like this is such a huge area Houston is
southeast Texas that once the remnants get up here we could be looking at this
incredible flood potential uh unlike anything that we have seen since Allison back in 2001 kind of need I remind yo
that we had a pretty bad flood in Houston Memorial Day 2015 and then we
had the tax day flood of 2016 and now we're knocking on the door here of a potentially historic and what we now know you know because of hindsight obviously it was cat catastrophic you know it was truly unprecedented one of those rare times that you can use that word and it is absolutely true so I didn't know any of
this ahead of time uh to the extent that
how it played out i'm not clairvoyant but I had this feeling again I'm telling you there's just no way to
convey that the way that I really want
to that I just had this deep sinking
feeling that Harvey was going to leave a mark that we would not soon forget and as I rolled through um the you know western part of Houston
and got out towards Katy uh you pass
Highway six out there um eventually
getting to the West Park Row area which is where my hotel was the Hampton Inn out there of course and I had stayed there a couple of times carrie's place was not too far from there further down Highway 6 um and I was kind of straddled
not kind of I was i 10 kind of splits um

the Addex Reservoir which is a big flood pool we're going to talk about that later because it's going to become important in part two um and then the
Barker uh reservoir to the south and it

10 goes through there and this is a West Park Row area you got the Children's Hospital katie is just a little bit farther to the west and there's this Hampton Inn and um it's just a uh South

Maid Creek is not far and I certainly had had experiences with that because that feeds right into the Addex Reservoir and that was going to be my hotel uh the Hampton Inn out here again I had stayed there before so I was pretty familiar with it so I roll in uh
at um kind of late it was a little bit later than I had thought but I was looking through my Twitter and um I guess my dinner with David took a little longer than expected but that's fine and it's getting close to midnight or so 1:00 a.m and all the uh guidance is
coming out the 11:00 advisory you know package everything and it just it
started ratcheting up even more all right and I was noticing here on the Twitter um somebody had posted I thought
this was kind of funny uh I'm going to save this picture for you i was getting close to the hotel and I uh saw these
different pictures coming in from people um somebody took a picture of the Tahoe
and again I'll save this for you while I was on I 10 heading into um Texas I guess uh earlier in the day
there on the 23rd from their big vehicle
they had a huge truck or something cuz uh you can see they have a Wilson's trucker antenna i saved this picture for you what are we at like picture number six or something uh but this is from somebody named Thomas Bulock and this is August 23rd 2017 they tagged me that
said "Mark cousin of mine just posted this on Facebook good luck and safe travels keep us posted." And indeed it is a picture of the Tahoe uh and boy

their windshield has a lot of bugs on it doesn't it if you check this picture out uh so that was really cool you know that people are tracking me while I'm tracking the storm but yeah I'm getting close um and uh there's a really nice
picture here i'll post this as well let's see what time this was uh 11:41 so
it really wasn't that late uh but there's Houston you can see the skyline it's kind of a fuzzy picture but I'll post it nevertheless i think this is picture number seven um and uh you know
it's getting close to midnight and of course that means it's getting close to 1:00 a.m central time and the ZeroZ GFS

is starting to roll out as they say and
especially on a site like Tropical Tidbits where you can access it really really easily and quickly and um I get
to the hotel I look at everything and
everybody's tweeting at me and so forth and it's ironic because right about the time that I do this let's see what time this was um this is 1:04 in the morning

i'm still up i'm at the hotel looking over everything and A Harvey's a tropical storm again winds are back up to 40 and B uh lots of interaction on

Twitter here that you know Mark have yo seen the zero ZGFS here we go omg yo

know you name it like all the the different ways to sort of pronounce that
this is uh not going to be good at all that was an understatement that was really starting to come out um late at night people are up they watch these models you know how that goes you might be one of them and it was not looking good you know the the intensity at the landfall looked like it was going to be up we were really starting to worry that this could become a major hurricane and
and I think this is perhaps more important the ensembles especially the
flood threat that was starting to unfold
for Southeast Texas was really really
starting like people were latching on to that and some of my longtime friends and colleagues in the business were sending me little memes and whatever um you know you're going to need a bigger boat and literally you're going to need a boat whatever it was not looking good and and it and it was becoming very clear by
this point late Wednesday night now remember I had dinner with David and I was a little befuddled as to like why is Harvey just putting along is it ever going to do anything all of this alarm going off that we got to really worry about this and I was concerned that it would be a crywolf syndrome and then now
it's like wait a minute you know let's pump the brakes Harvey because it looked like it could overachieve and again there's that that line that we just the science just still isn't there where we can know for certain even 2 days out

what is going to happen with these things you know you think 48 hours man the models have got to get a good handle on it and no they don't you know and
that still is the case all these years later seven eight years later whatever
yes it is still a problem the models trying to figure this out and humans trying to interpret the models because remember the models are not forecasts they are guidance you know they are numerical weather prediction it's just it's math and physics all right and boy
though the math and physics was pointing to a very dangerous situation with the landfall looking like that could really ramp up and then the catastrophic rain

and I remember in the years since being at different conferences is and hearing from people that work with the hydrometeorological prediction center now the WPC or weather prediction center just easier for people to say that rather than hydrometeorological I guess
but they didn't believe the uns like this 50 60 in that come on like eh
that's got to be way overdone right yo
know like they they admit that it was absolutely baffling to see the models
doing this the euro the GFS and the different blends and ensembles you name it everything was pointing to a high-end event and it became very clear by the
time I was ready to to finally hit the pillow and get some much needed sleep that we were going to have two events
here the landfall and I needed to put the cameras out and the weather stations i had two of them and maybe and I do remember now for sure that I did bring the Herby payload and Carrie had the helium um maybe we'd be able to launch the weather balloon Herby into the eye if if we could do so safely so this became truly an all cards in
everything's in we're all in on it all the chips in whatever the expression is we're all in on this that this could be a truly monumental hurricane event and

it's going to have two parts it's going to have the landfall and it's going to have the flood threat and we're going to cover both and uh it ended up that the
second part was mostly me because everybody else got isolated but we'll cover that in part two in the next episode but uh we still got a lot of of stuff to talk about in this episode so as I wrap up this segment here's a little bit of audio as I am getting close to my hotel there on the west side of Houston near Katy along West Park Row as I've known it at the uh the Hampton end there this is uh some of the things that I was talking about as I signed off the YouTube feed and eventually got some sleep and ready for the next day August 24th
2017 all right so to recap I'm going to get to the hotel i'm going to do a video discussion i'll publish that i'm going to get some sleep get up tomorrow and figure out what to do
next so just stay tuned when I go live
you'll know if you're subscribed yo should get a uh notification on your
device for our subscribers of our website Hurricane Track Insider members
I'll be posting stuff in the chat i'm going to do a special private briefing for you guys at some point tomorrow or tomorrow evening so stay tuned for that and tomorrow will be a day closer
i'm getting ready to jump off here so I'm going to roll things up so I can run
into the hotel and take care of business so thanks to everybody that held on and watched i appreciate it stay tuned for that update within the hour shouldn't take an hour but within the hour and I'll see you again tomorrow thanks for watching bye y'all stay safe
out there yourselves

heat heat

we are now up to Thursday August 24th
2017 i'm in Houston carrie's back todd's
back i think they were just as tired as I was cuz they had to drive back from Wyoming and I finally got a good night's sleep i mean I had been going strong pretty much since Sunday the 20th with the eclipse stuff and then getting everything ready after the eclipse driving all the way to Texas but finally Wednesday night I got some good sleep and when I woke up and took a look at things the first post on social media of
the daytime hours of the 24th anyway
9:47 a.m central time I posted on
Twitter quote "I just woke up and man did I need that sleep time i look at what's up with Harvey." Oh and then it's just four stars you know like oh yo know what because we were all thinking it we were all seeing it i'll save the satellite picture i posted it just a few seconds later um let me see what picture
this is going to be for you this will be picture number uh eight and man is it a
doozy harvey really starting to come together developing the outflow you can
see the big anticyclone on top of the thing just the the look you know that look and it was it was happening the hot
towers of deep thunderstorms are rotating counterclockwise around a deepening low pressure area and uh on
that tweet where I posted that picture picture number eight satellite picture I said just wow i sure hope people know what this means it's been a long time
and I was referring to the fact that it
was all but a guarantee now that we were going to have a major hurricane category 3 or higher making landfall
and the hurricane center was explicitly forecasting that now at this point and
this was really starting to become a concern for parts of the central to

lower Texas coast down there maybe around Corpus Christi you know we weren't sure exactly where yet obviously
but it was really becoming serious and
the storm surge forecasts were going up and the wind forecast obviously um and
then we were also starting to see more and more evidence that after landfall I
mean it was going to be moving slow anyway but after landfall Harvey would just creep around Texas for 2 or 3 days

dumping absurd amounts of rain and that
was really starting to show up more and more in the guidance and and and in the messaging from the National Hurricane Center local weather forecast offices especially Houston Galveastston and I was honed in on that i'm going to be very very honest about it that I again had this feeling that we
were going to be looking at a historic event just sometimes you look at the pattern and it screams back at you yo need to pay attention to me and this was one of those times so we had the landfall coming up major hurricane and
then we were going to have the part two part uh in southeast Texas southwest
Louisiana that would be this big catastrophic flood we just didn't know how bad it was going to end up being obviously but I was ready for that mentally and I I told Carrie and Todd
that look as soon as we can get the equipment we need to recharge those batteries and then move stuff up to Houston in vicinity for the potential big flood because remember Carrie and I had been on top of this starting in 2015
just 2 years earlier when I came out for
the remnants of Patricia trying to learn about the Houston area flood network um
working with Jeff Lindner and the Harris County Flood Control District um yo know that that was I mean Houston's one of the biggest cities in the country and they are built in an area that floods very very easy when you get excessive rainfall and it can be very disruptive
catastrophic you know um the impacts
reach far beyond Houston because it can mess up all kinds of things from the prochemical industry to shipping to yo
know they have the two big airports there with IAH the George Bush airport
and hobby and uh when everything gets you know screwed up over there it does have ripple effects throughout the economy and we were looking at the potential of historic rainfall and I
wanted to make sure that that part of this story was told that unlike most

quote hurricane chasers end quote um I
don't go there for the excitement of the wind and catch some storm surge video and then No there's a lot more to it than that and I wanted to make sure that we covered that part extensively you know
very important it's all about the impacts and we were going to be ready to the best of our ability so uh I started
kind of narrowing things down i put that on Twitter as well my thoughts regarding our plans for Harvey deploy up to five
remote cameras set out our two weather stations and hopefully launch the Herby weather balloon and then number four
stay safe probably should be number one but I think staying safe is the default right that's always there uh so I was

getting ready to head out uh probably published a video discussion at some point that day i don't see that I tweeted it um it probably be hard to
find i could look for it and see but uh we know pretty much what we need to know that Harvey was on the uptick and it was looking pretty rough out there uh over the next couple of days then a couple
things started happening one I reached out on social media especially Twitter here and probably in my YouTube video whatever one I would have posted that morning asking people and this might have been the first time that I had ever done this um but asking people down in

the Texas coast there do you have property that we could put a camera on a house a business whatever the case may be and um started getting a few
responses but a lot of people were already evacuating and again that part of Texas well that part all of Texas it's not easy i've said it already that you can't just drive down the coastline and stick cameras out you know like The Deadliest Catch where they just throw lobster pots out into the ocean or um
you remember that movie The Perfect Storm and they call it long line fishing the the long liners and you just drop 40 miles of um fishing cable basically with

hooks on it and they're all in a line and you catch the swordfish and you reel them in nope that's not how this works in Texas it is very difficult to move

about because the all the different bays and everything and uh just the access points it's hard so it's time consuming
so any help that we could find from people oh yeah you could use my property i was looking for that and we had limited responses but um and some were
just not feasible there would be yo know hey you could use my house my business or whatever and it wasn't necessarily in an area where I thought we would capture the best impacts so I
was thinking Sergeant Surfside Beach
Port O'Conor uh kind of far to the north
certainly north of Corpus Christi um
maybe because I already thought we're definitely putting stuff in Corpus Christi and we'll just figure it out when we get there that was probably the reasoning cuz remember we had five cameras so I wanted three of them north
of Corpus and I was thinking of Sergeant Surfside Beach Port Oconor um I think I
had been to the Port Oconor area once back in 2003 but I've never been to Sergeant and I hadn't been to Surfside Beach yet that I could remember in 2017 um so I put that out there and uh

told Carrie and Todd you know when we would meet and and where and whatever and uh then we'd start heading uh to the southwest or south whatever down towards Corpus Christi so that was all in place
and I was pretty happy with how everything was going up until the moment that I was getting emails and maybe some texts from people that our app the Hurricane Impact app was crashing people
would open it they would look for information the app would run for a few seconds then it would just crash gone and through some investigation I determined that our backend server one
of two that we use was having issues uh
there was like a power outage or something at one of the data centers over in Kansas City and I was having
trouble and when when that happens there's nothing you can do unless yo have a huge team and a lot of money and you can just move everything to some other data center you know if you've got the resources you can manage something like that with a snap of a finger we didn't have that so that was very stressful like I mean it was and our insider site uh was not working it and
the server itself was just like offline
and that was very stressful now let me
give you just a little bit of backend history real quick we're going to yo know I don't want to make this into a long segue but in 2008 we decided after

Gustaf and Ike put a huge load on the
hurricane track server and and when I
say server it's not one box usually uh
usually it's like what we call the cloud right um but long story short Gustaf and

Ike were huge spikes in traffic the site

wouldn't handle it and it cost me some

uh some business probably signing people up for our premium services and whatnot
and and we had this tremendous exposure from CNN and it was a very very tough defeat i covered that in a long previous episode ago but ever since 2008 like
later that year into '09 we split the
the responsibilities if you will the load hurricane.com would be on its own web host or server
uh called Media Temple and it was
cloud-based basically or what they call the grid and so it would load balance
when you'd get a huge spike because of what people call the Oprah moment yo know you go on Oprah Winfrey back in the day she promotes your website or your book or whatever your product bam you're an instant millionaire that was the idea so that's literally a term in the business the an Oprah moment so if yo have an Oprah moment you got to be able to handle the traffic and up until 2008
um we were hosted through Yahoo and everything seemed to work pretty good i was on Art Bell in 2005 and it handled the traffic just fine i remember Art actually told me before I went on my friend Paul who got
me booked on there he was Art's friend as well that's how that all happened he said "Art wants to make sure your website can handle everything." I was like "Yeah I'm I'm hosted through Yahoo it'll be fine." But between 2005 and
2008 even then just those three years
web traffic on the whole increased i don't know what it is right but it's always getting bigger and bigger and bigger now in 2017 you know there's
billions of people literally on the internet and you know however many thousands and thousands per second were trying to hit our servers uh it just
wasn't working you know in '08 even and so we split everything up put hurricanetrack.com on its own web host and then put the premium services which became the insider site and that's what it is now and probably will forever be uh on its own virtual private server
with a different company called Onein-One and I think they were owned by
another company called Ionos io NOS
anyway it is starting to turn into a long segue isn't it but that's all right so the the idea was to keep the two separate in case one has a problem the other one is still there preferably we were protecting the insider site because that's where our crowdfunding um at whatever level it would ever be uh
was protected because those are the people that are investing to keep the the dream alive right so if hurricanetrack.com had a big hit and it
wasn't working at least people could still log into the insider site so on
August 24th 2017 Ionos uh one in one had an outage
over in Kansas and the server was down
you know the whole infrastructure and we were dead in the water so that stress also greeted me in the morning of the
24th there and there's lots of tweets me back and forth tagging them on Twitter and then there was a lot of uh direct messaging back and forth um so I had to

kind of now look that's very stressful it is and there's times when you just say look there's nothing you can do worrying about it my father used to tell me that all the time like worrying about it won't help like how is that going to
help you sitting there worrying you know keep moving keep going and hopefully it'll resolve itself but you know I don't own the company Ionos whatever there's nothing I can do they're aware so go about your business and do what you do and so I was able to shove it to
for the most part and keep on going and to that end uh I put out a quick video
uh and I remember doing this too i I can still visualize myself putting this video together isn't that weird it's so neat um I think so anyway so here's a
little video discussion that I put out it's very short i'm going to play the whole thing the audio where I I took a real quick look at Harvey and then I showed what we were going to be doing with the equipment at least some of it anyway i had it in my hotel room getting everything ready but this is a good little look back at how things were evolving that morning there and let me see what time I posted this because that's important um I guess I was still at the hotel how about that they they let me stay uh or maybe I was there for another night i don't know but this was 2:16 p.m on August uh 24th 2017 quick

video update showing some of the equipment that we were putting out for Harvey good afternoon to you markith hurricanetrack.com it's about 2:15 p.m eastern time i am in Texas awaiting Hurricane Harvey and it's rapidly
intensifying in the Gulf uh definitely has everybody's attention and uh they need to be getting ready for it i wanted to show you here in my hotel room a look at three of these unmanned cameras that I will be placing with my team out in
the path of Harvey these are designed to
stream live video and they are protected
by these uh Pelican cases inside are two

powerful longlasting lithium battery packs and mobile hotspots in each side
and inside of each of these that'll give us about a 30hour run time and we can
put these anywhere anywhere that we have a good solid 4G LTE signal which is
pretty much anywhere uh these have been in hurricanes such as Hermine last year and Matthew and uh numerous flood events
here in Texas for testing as well as a few winter storms so they are ready to go this is three out of the five we have five total i just wanted to show yo what these look like they're very small in comparison to my hand here you can see that it's not too much larger than a lunchbox so uh only about 5 lbs and uh

very easy to deploy and we will post these on Twitter the links to them they
stream to our Ustream channel and we
will also have a live feed from these cameras switching around between the five on our YouTube live as well uh we
want to make sure that everybody has a chance to see these because hopefully everybody's going to evacuate because of what's coming here with Hurricane Harvey now with 85 mph winds in the Gulf of Mexico for hurricanetrack.com i'm Mark Sudden in Houston Texas i'll be down in the Alice Texas area not far from Corpus Christi this evening and I'll have more of these types of reports for yo throughout the rest of this event all right so we're in the early afternoon hours of the 24th and I'm finally done
at the hotel and it's time to start moving time to get down towards Corpus Christi now I didn't want to be in
Corpus itself the forecast track as uh I
look back at the hurricane center site had the center coming in pretty close to Corpus Christi um I didn't want to be
right in Corpus you know you say well Mark come on why not well I mean think about it we got to have power you know
and uh I want to be able to upload stuff from the hotel I want to be able to work and so we looked around Corpus Christi north or south there were some options but if Harvey moved north or south of the forecast fact that could be problematic and you certainly don't want to be north of it cuz that's on the dirty side usually as they say so we get kind of got lucky that there's a town there um west northwest or so of Corpus

called Alice Texas and that was going to
be our base camp so I booked the Hampton in um for myself for Carrie and Todd and

I met them for lunch somewhere i plainly
remember and again you can heckle me all you like that's fine uh that we went to Boston Market uh over there in somewhere
in the Sugarland area had a good lunch
for me it was probably breakfast as well and um took a look at everything uh and

really the adrenaline started going because Harvey's ramping up and it's
it's time to go yeah we're going to leave and drive southwest down the coast and get over to Alice and be ready to set everything out
starting early Friday morning and then we will absolutely obviously be able to nail down the landfall area and and do
the best that we possibly can uh still
though I'm getting people tagging me asking me "Hey your app isn't working i just got your app it keeps crashing." So
as I said I try to shove that and my dad said you know don't worry about it right well when it keeps coming back at yo you know hey Mark I just tried your app and it keeps crashing what's up uh I had to deal with it so I'm tweeting back at people you know well we're working on it there's an outage with our server whatever and most people were very understanding you get the occasional grouch or troll or whatever that yo know gives you no latitude and um I
don't see any responses that I made to people like that but I know they were out there and that weighs on you cuz I'm trying to do the best I can and uh when you have something like this come along that's out of your control it's hard it is so we finally get out of Houston and

um you make your way down let me pull up a map of that area cuz I want to make sure I get all of my highways and cities

exactly right uh again we're going to go down to Alice Texas so let's just punch in Houston here to the Google Maps and
yeah it's several hours down there for sure uh not quite as far as South Padre we've done that drive quite a few times uh but luckily we start in Sugarland and
um then you have Rosenberg out there that's Highway 59 you take that down through Wharton Elcampo eventually down to Victoria which I've been to several times in my career up to this point and uh from there let's see what we
would have done probably jumped down on
69E and ironically you know we didn't know that this would you know become significant until later but we passed through and I love the pronunciation of this this town Refurio and it's spelled R E F U Gio yo
think it'd be refugeio but it's refurio
strange right yes it is um so we pass
through there and then you get down to Sententon and you come down to this town called Odum and then you're finally on the west side of Corpus Christi where 37 is interstate 37 goes up to San Antonio
and then you head west to Alice and
Alice is a good you know chunk of distance away from Corpus which was good i wanted that i wanted to not be affected directly by the eyewall or
anything like that so I wanted us away from the coast so that we could work the best that we could before and during

however this would play out because remember we're not going to sit out there in the eye of a category 3 hurricane unless we can launch the weather balloon because there's just no sense in doing it it's it's too dangerous especially near water and especially near the Texas water right that surge down there can be absolutely
astounding so I remember we uh get into

Corpus the west side of Corpus Christi and I met up with uh a reporter from
KPRC i had done several pieces with them over the years dating all the way back to Ike in 2008 so I did a a hit with

them and I think I did a hit with uh what is it over there is it Fox 8 I think it is or 4 it's one of those numbers whatever the Fox station is um

in Houston it's uh John Dawson his
station i think it's Fox 4 now that I remember um so I think I did a hit with them and an interview uh when we say a hit that's that's what that means and um
yeah it was good to get some media exposure talking about the project and uh of course I would be working with the Weather Channel uh but I'm not exclusive in terms of interviews you I could still do interviews but any any live video from the cameras the Weather Channel would have access to and um back in the
day though just a little side note I never did anything live no interviews or whatever on the Weather Channel it was just the cameras and I always felt like that that was kind of odd i thought wouldn't it be good to do setup pieces here's Mark Setith and here's these cameras and here's where they're going to be and you can watch them on the Weather Channel and on Hurricane Track they never did that that would change many years later you'll see we'll get there um anyway did the interviews with
local media and um you say local media I mean Houston down to Corpus you're talking several million people in these markets so that was good um we get over
to Alice and um pull into the to the

hotel there the Hampton Inn and we felt pretty confident about everything that we're kind of ahead of schedule um yo
know like the hurricane is was it a hurricane yet let's see um so 10:00 a.m

let's just back it up a little bit i got up and it was that you know oh crap moment it was up to 65 and then Yes oh

yeah so by 100 p.m central it was an 85
mileph hurricane and by the time we got

to Alice it was still 85 but yes it was

definitely on the uptick all right in fact let me just save this because I think this will be important as a sort of a benchmark here uh I think we're up to picture number 10 I do believe and

there we go yep so it's an 85 mph hurricane and uh picture number 11 nice
little shot here as we were on our way down to the Corpus Christi area um yeah
that's a it's just gorgeous out there ahead of these hurricanes usually lots of sinking air clear skies that's when you know they're going to be bad when everything's clear out in front of them there's no shear coming no front no rain out ahead of it you know that's not a good sign and you look at the beautiful sky there in that shot you think "Oh what a what a wonderful evening." Well that's a harbinger of things to come believe me um so yeah we get to the
hotel and uh uh again just sort of a

kind of a calm came over me the the web
server stuff got resolved through oneonone and the app's back up and running the insider sites fine the emails quit you know and the tweets at me like "What's happening with your stuff?" All that was resolved so we were able to settle in we went to the store
whatever they had over there Walmart or something uh grabbed a few food items and snacks waters whatever and uh really

settled in you know like all right we're ready we're here okay and it's all good
and I can't post video obviously um
sometimes there's video where the audio is just not important but I'm watching this video right now that I put on Twitter and the the tweet itself was the proverbial calm before the storm here in Alice Texas and it's a shot of the animometer on the Tahoe uh and I had
went ahead and set that up i don't drive around well we don't have animometers on our trucks anymore but back in the day you take the propeller off uh and sometimes the whole apparatus just to keep bugs and birds from hitting it or whatever those things are very expensive so I put the animometer on it's you know it's it's almost go time and uh I showed a shot of the uh wind reader the the tracker on the the dashboard um and it
was 2 mph gusting to six i mean
literally the calm before the storm right um so let's see what time this is
i said uh also the latest run of the European model really disturbs me ouch
i'll be up in a few hours and in Texas
for the next week it looks like uh yeah
yeah yeah so this is 2:46 in the morning
so um I guess I finally got some sleep

and let's see what else was happening here 1:51 in the morning oh here's a radar shot uh I said "Well crap the first of
the rainbands of this probable epic hurricane are almost here i guess I better go take a look." Yeah I was trying to go to sleep that's the thing it's hard it is you got to turn everything off in your brain and just completely think about something else and try to just compartmentalize it and say "All right we're done we're here hurricane is tomorrow tomorrow night it's going to be a long event especially with Harvey here block it all out go to bed." Sleep is the paramount safety net

it is that if if we can get good sleep as a team uh whoever I'm working with and and and me especially because obviously this is you know I'm the face of it that's important very important
and it is hard to do uh I've gotten better at it over the years where yo just go you know what go to sleep screw all this it'll be there in the morning 2017 I was still learning I guess it's always a learning experience and the older I've gotten the better I've gotten at managing all of this But I mean you look at that radar there and I'm going to save this for you i think we're at picture number uh 12 so your

radar scope screenshot and there's this
little area almost like a little coastal trough think about the hurricane as like a huge rock that's been thrown into the water and the ripples come out from it because it is it's this massive area of energy approaching the coast so it sends
um not gravity waves necessarily but
there are little pieces of energy that come out ahead of it and you get these little tiny little areas almost like a little coastal trough that come in before the bands even um and it
influences the weather and and there was one of those coming in and it just happened to do so at 1:51 in the morning
um you know what I realized too just looking at this this is really interesting all of my timestamps that I
talk about on Twitter are Eastern time
uh and so I might look at it and say because I'm in Texas I thought it was Central time but the actual timestamps on Twitter are Eastern time and I noticed this because the radar scope I just saved was 1:51 a.m that's certainly
central time 1:54 whatever and then I
posted it and it says 2:54 a.m because I
guess I'm based in you know because I'm in North Carolina whatever i just noticed that doesn't matter if it's off an hour whatever uh but I just I just caught that so yeah I saved that picture for you picture number 11 and I was wondering when I had that tweet there about the latest run of the European model really disturbs me and it says 2:46 a.m that's Eastern time you know and
anyway whatever so yeah I'm still up at
150 saw that radar shot and uh I went
out to um the uh the parking lot and

sure enough the first raindrops start coming in and I took a little video of
it and again there's no audio i mean there's like a little breeze or whatever but I'm not talking there's no narration but it was very telling and uh we'll end
this block on this note here i remember I saw that radar shot and there's just
something about it when you get the first drops of rain and the first breezes from what is going to be an an

historic event and I remember for Katrina Mike Watkins and I noticed when
it first started raining the first few drops we were sitting at a parking lot
of a church's fried chicken looking at the radar and just sitting there August 28th 2005 and it just started raining very little light drops and I remember I told Mike I said "There's the first rain of what's going to be a historic hurricane." And those little moments I remember them that's what just lives inside this brain of mine and in 2017

because we have iPhones and it's easy to post this stuff I took a video cuz I wanted to document that and so the tweet was "The first drops of rain and the first breezes from Harvey we have only just begun this saga from small things
dot dot dot." Trying to be poetic there right so yeah I uh posted that that was

let's see what time that was uh 2:23

uh Central time 3:23 in the Eastern time zones it was time for me to go to bed after that and indeed I would because when we get up on the um 26th 20 25th of

August sorry because we're already on the 25th because it flipped over to midnight and I'm still up posting raindrops and breezes but yeah I got to get some sleep because once we get up on the 25th it really is go time we got to set equipment up and we got to be ready for what is going to be a catastrophic Hurricane Harvey landfall down there along the central Texas coast

all right back with you now stories from the hurricane highway continuing we are up to Friday August 25th
2017 harvey well on its way to becoming a major hurricane and it's go time for
the team and myself we got to put out as many of these cameras as we can we got five of them we got the two weather stations we got the Herby payload with us and we are anticipating a

significant absolute beast of a hurricane coming in maybe Corpus Christi
maybe a little bit south maybe a little bit north you know we don't know for sure at this time and we're ready though
it's time to get going i got a few hours of sleep after people telling me the night before you know don't stay up too late that's hard to do it's hard to take
that advice when there's so much intensity everything just ratchets up it's hard to turn the brain off but I managed to do it for a little bit and off we go our first order of business
that Friday was to set the weather
station up and what I wanted to do was head out uh of Alice remember we are a

good deal inland from the coast and I did that quite on purpose plenty of hotels Hilton hotels remember that's my brand uh in and around the Corpus Christie area but I didn't want to be in what I call the blast zone all right i didn't want to be there where the power is going to be out there's just mayhem everywhere we got to be able to be outside that area where we can work to
upload video to keep the website updated
go in and out let's just say it was going to make landfall right over Corpus Christi being an Alice would have with a uh would have given us an advantage that's the way I looked at it and it's not that far honestly and it's a pretty easy highway that you take let me zoom in on the Google Maps here that's Highway 44 east uh out of Alice and yo
connect up to uh 69E which is the interstate that
eventually takes you down to 77 and yo go to South Padre Island well you first got to go through Haringen and all that
but that's neither here nor there we're trying to focus here on Corpus Christie and it was easy to get there and I had chosen uh a bridge down on

35B because 35 is the southwest to

northeast running I guess like a state highway along well just inland along the coast there of Texas at least where we were and um it branches off and you got
Corpus Christi Bay and then Oso Bay i think that's how you pronounce it oso and 35B goes across there and it's this
bridge with steel railings and it's got the vertical steel beams the I-beams
whatever you call them and that's where I wanted to put the weather station so we drove in not a lot of traffic it's already raining and uh a little bit breezy uh but nothing you know too hindering um just slowed us down a little bit and it's never pleasant to try to set stuff up during the rain but what are you going to do you know we're trying to uh get there and and and
figure this thing out which is always hard you're trying to secondguess mother nature there and be one step ahead so we get down to this bridge and Todd helped
me uh Carrie stayed back in the truck
and monitored things make sure everything was working on the website and in the app and we got that thing up and running and I'm going to save a couple pictures for you here let me see which these will be uh pretty fascinating stuff i like that again all this stuff is saved first picture number 13 for you in the selection of photos as
you watch this hopefully you look these up on Discord or look at them on Patreon uh picture number 13 is a screenshot from the app of everything
working and uh it was it was great it was a really exciting moment one of the rare like victories for that app that was so stressful for me uh at least it
was working the infrastructure side from our web host was all fixed and everything's good so this at least I didn't have to worry about that but it was up and running we had the weather station running which is the RM young animometer and probably at this point in

time I would think we were using the RM young pressure sensor as well and it was
inside this little box that keeps it from getting wet and everything is zip
tied and or we use layers of Gorilla
tape and we attach it to Todd again
helped me we attach it to this I-beam this vertical beam that's part of the railing of this bridge here uh on 35B
that eventually turns into John F kennedy Boulevard uh oh no causeway sorry John F kennedy
uh Memorial Causeway after you leave
Corpus Christi and that takes you out to
uh what is that mustang Island or somewhere out there something like that but it's running and I'm real happy about it you know because we got live data and uh let's look at what it was saying at the time this was set up at 9:06 central time and the wind was 30
mph sustained that's our 1 minute average anyway and the gust was 35 and

the air pressure 1,000 102 mibars and again just a small victory there but it's it was significant you know because I thought man if we get lucky and meteorologically here and not certainly not for Corpus Christi but and the center comes right over or they're in that right front quadrant uh this is going to be some extraordinary data very
helpful to measure the windfield and certainly the air pressure and I was
happy with this this was good now with it we had the live camera and this was a

big change we were shifting away from having just a still image with the weather data that had been there since 2004 when we first designed all this way
back in '04 um all these years later now
it's live video with the weather station
and that was done through the first camera the Logitech camera system and that was camera number one looking across this Oso Bay toward the Naval Air
Station Corpus Christi and it had really
good exposure uh from the north and
northeast i mean pretty much any direction cuz it's on a bridge for goodness sake so it's elevated uh but we're good to go we got that thing running and I'm tweeting about it and tagging uh Brad Hunstable at uh at

Ustream and letting him know that we're
up and running everything's terrific and he should check it out now remember IBM
had purchased Ustream or they were working on it or something but um I
wanted I tagged IBM Cloud Video as well
yeah I was trying to get the attention of these big-time companies obviously
but it is really neat also to just say "Hey look we are using your invention
because Brad he and I think a partner of
his they came up with Ustream i believe that was back in 2007." And you know part of it yes
trying to get the attention of of some potentially very wealthy and uh

influential billionaires whatever and a big company like IBM and they were working with the Weather Channel and I mentioned that as well that these will all be streaming on the Weather Channel or seen on the Weather Channel anyway but yeah it's running and we're happy with that um I think picture number 14
I'm going to save for you here is a shot that I took from down on this little

side street that was under the bridge um
let's see if I can pinpoint where that was using Google Maps doesn't matter too much but it's like a little service road and it comes around and actually goes under the bridge you do like a u a U-turn there's a little fishing beach down there um and then you look up and there's the weather station so that's picture number 14 where whereby you can
see the weather station mounted up there
and uh it was just a really neat moment i'm I'm very proud of it and uh we were
very confident that that thing would hold again you layer Gorilla tape in in the right method and different spots yo
know uh to really fasten it and it is very very strong so the next order of
business here uh on our mission that day

was to get up to Port O' Conor and
that's up there on the Madagorta Bay if memory serves and as the expression goes

and it's used many different ways one
does not simply just drive from Corpus to Porto Conor like "Hey it's just a few
minutes away." Believe me it's a chore
you got to go through Corpus Christi Portland and then around Rockport or
through Rockport Fulton and across the Capano Bay up through Tyoli
uh and then you come down i guess maybe
we took uh one of those little small highways through Longm and then to Seadrift and then it's this diagonal
like let me zoom in on the Google map and get a read on uh it's Highway 186
and I mean this thing is flat and it's
mostly marshy out there um not a lot

going on out there believe me quite a few turtles and maybe some gators very

very marshy and it's just inland from

the barrier island system Madagorta Island and uh I mean you got the Aranzis
National Wildlife Refuge out there and
there's just not a lot happening now Port Okconor um is just southeast of Indianola and
Indianola is infamous in hurricane history because I think it was hit twice
by significant hurricanes in the 1900s

or something like that i don't know my history that well uh at least way back
then but they got tired of it and Indianola was mostly abandoned uh look that up sometime on the Wikipedia google
Indianola hurricane history and it's
pretty fascinating um that you know cuz they were competing with Galveastston you got the Madagorta Bay and Port Okconor down there but the
hurricanes were too much and they said all right screw this we're out of here
and Indianola is just a shadow of its former self but just to give you some context here northwest of there you got Port Lvaka that's a little bit larger of a city but then down there you got Port Okconor and there's uh nice fishing beaches and whatnot but yeah it's a it's
it's not easy to get out there especially the wind is picking up and so forth and my thought was let's get this thing on Madagorta Bay and if the surge
does come over the uninhabited islands
out there um I mean a good deal of them
are just refuge whatever there's no
condos or whatnot out there it's just dunes and you got some passes or inlets and I thought you know man this thing surely Port O' Connor will be in the right front quadrant and this should be
pretty significant so Todd and Carrie and I caravanned up there they followed me i was in the Tahoe and they followed
me out there and we're streaming live on YouTube by the way I do recall that there was trouble that day for some reason it would crash and I'd have to start it over again and you have to start with a new title and it was just cumbersome uh so there's like two hour streams and then a three-hour stream and then it would break and that was a little frustrating and then I think I switched over to Ustream at some point and you know there's just not a lot of Verizon signal out there we were using you know the Verizon network for our streaming uh through these hotspots and anyway a few challenges but by and large
the day was moving along as expected so
we get out there and the surge forecast
was pretty significant um you know 8 to
10 maybe 12 feet this was looking really bad depending on obviously where the core comes in and whether or not it's at high tide and all the standard caveats but you know we were prepared we
had a ladder and everything and Todd and I worked to set the camera up on a
wooden utility pole pretty close to I
think it's called King Fisher Beach or something like that and I mean it is right there along the main road it's
like Park Street or something like that and there is a park there's a gazebo or not a gazebo it's like a a shelter and

it was uh pretty easy there's nobody there there was hardly like maybe one or two people most of Port Okconor was evacuated uh so we didn't have anybody that had you know that was bothering us or whatever and no questions asked what are you guys doing but we put the camera up i remember how high we put it and Carrie chuckles like man that's the highest we've ever put one it was like 12 ft up you know cuz that I was like I this could be a really big surge yo know i mean Indianola was wiped out a couple times over the years and I I didn't want to take any chances so we put that camera real high and we kind of
aimed it where you could see this little shelter thing it is like a steel framed
picnic shelter at King Fisher Beach and

we were all set and uh ready to do the
next deployment now couple things to
sort of interject into the story here
first of all when we crossed Capano Bay

uh on our way out there which is farther
to the southwest not too far out of Fulton and Rockport uh there's Capano
Village and then there's Lamar Holiday Beach and then you got Capano Bay and there's this bridge and this is all along Highway 35 i don't know if that's a state highway or what but it is uh Highway 35 and again 35 runs let's just

call it out of Corpus Christie for the sake of this story again up through Portland uh eventually Rockport Fulton
as I mentioned Holiday Beach Lamar all that and then it goes up to Tyoli and
Port Lvaka Port Comfort and Palashius

and so forth so 35
um you know just one of those coastal I guess it's two-lane and it weaves around and you know it it's it's significant but it's not fourlane it's not an interstate all right but it does have obviously when it crosses these bays yo got these bridges and I'm going to tell you one of the most disappointing misses like I missed it uh of my career

and it wasn't my fault it's just The way it goes is Lamar Holiday Beach whatever

this area the Capano Bay we drove across that bridge coming and going and uh yo
know going out to uh Port Okconor and then coming back and that bridge that goes across Capano Bay it's it's fairly long um and I thought this I mean I knew it

just something like a bell went off whatever this is going to be ground zero
i just had this feeling and there was
nowhere to put the weather station because that bridge was built
differently it was all concrete and the
rail the side of it was wide
concrete and there was nowhere to lash

or splint or whatever you want to call it the weather station mast you know for the animometer there just wasn't anywhere to do it and I was thinking and
I told Carrie and Todd this is a this is
terrible like we got to figure out another way here we got to have a backup plan because and I mean we looked really hard believe me we slowed down we looked
around and there was just nowhere to mount anything it was just not possible because the way they constructed that
bridge again all concrete the railings and everything and golly man what a miss
that was cuz that was in the core yo
know the core finally came over as yo guys probably know uh Rockport Fulton
they took the eye the eyewall and all that oh man that would have been
extraordinary data and it haunts me to this day believe me but it's not just me

that has and again that was and we were prepared equipment-wise we just didn't have any way to put it there but a miss is still a miss all right but we're not alone josh Worman Dr joshua Worman I

think it's the Center for Severe Weather Research i don't know if that's still the name of it now but he's got the Doppler on wheels he was in the
original I think untainted version of
Stormchasers and they do severe weather research hurricanes but they set up down there they had the Doppler on wheels uh and they were in uh Rockport as well and I
remember uh him and Karen I think she might be a PhD as well so we'll call her Dr karen but they were both presenters at the 2018 National Tropical Weather Conference and they talked about that they took one
of their uh wind sensor probes as they call it i think that's the term they use it's a little short stubby thing with a very heavy round base uh and then like a
2ft tall or something like that maybe 3 ft at the most uh mast that comes up out
of the center of this round disc thing that's very heavy uh I don't know probably a couple feet across uh very very bottomheavy and they went and put it on this wide concrete rail you know

the the side of this bridge and just left it there and they said that the wind of the eyewall blew it into Capano
Bay and I I chuckled i think I even did
it out loud when they said that so I was like "What?" And I even may have raised my hand during Q&A or whatever and said
like you guys didn't strap it down or I don't even know if there was a way to do that but like it it was sad because that
was data that nobody got from that open
spot and golly what a miss i mean that
would have been just tremendous but I felt a little better that even the great Dr joshua Worman and his team stuff can
go wrong with them too you know it's just like misery loves company right uh
so yeah we're not going to put anything in Lamar we're not going to put anything down there and something else was going on that sort of made me change my

strategy for Harvey and that was and I
go back to the graphics archive here want to make sure I got everything uh correct um so as we're

working let's see what time this would be all right there we are so at 10:00

a.m that morning Central time this again
is Friday the 25th of August it's almost

a category 3 winds are up to 110 and
it's moving northwest at 10
and it was basically starting to slow down it was going slow it picked up a little bit and it was slowing down again and we did the math we looked at everything this is 10:00 a.m and it's
slowing down it's forecast to slow even more and then just kind of mill around
uh around the central Texas coast and of course we got the big flood threat coming and we're going to address that in its entirety i'll touch upon it a little bit before we wrap up this episode but the the signs are definitely there that we're going to have a really big part two all right so it's slowing
down and I realized we just did the math

it is not going to make landfall during the day painfully slow it's going to come in like an hour after dark maybe even later i mean at the very least an hour after dark so I
decided we won't put out any more cameras we only had five at the time we've got two set up one on the Oso Bay
south side of Corpus Christi and then the other one up at Port Okconor and
that's it like I can't I even we thought about Rockport and I might have even said "Yeah we're going to put one at Rockport." But once we realized this was
going to make landfall at night it became like not I don't want to

say not necessary but we don't have the
lighting capability we didn't have any infrared whatever like we do now with the Nest cams that we use it was just a lost cause the power is going to go out
we're not going to see anything we don't know anybody down there we don't have any lighting you know it just it was not
happening so I thought let's not worry about putting these other three cameras out the batteries are charged at least

and this is where I was trying to think outside the box as they say at least
we've got these three additional ones in

case we can't get to Port O Conor when

it's over or for some reason the one on
the bridge there at Oso Bay uh because I

wanted to make darn sure that we were ready for the flood that I thought would
be coming and we all looked at it and you know the data was there i wanted to make sure that we were as ready as
possible for the Houston chapter of this

saga so I called off the deployment so
to speak i mean it's just a change of plans it's not I mean nature does what nature does you got to roll with it and the technology of the time didn't allow us to do what we can do today you know we are much better capable today for nighttime situations way better and uh
but we didn't have that back then so um
we worked throughout the day let me check the Twitter here to figure out the timeline of what's happening and when uh
a couple videos porto Connor Camera 2
was set up what time was that 12:50 p.m

central time so even by this point uh
let's just fast forward it to the intermediate advisory that came out at
noon 1:00 p.m eastern noon central um

and it was still the same data 1:10 and still moving northwest at 10 but yo know pretty slow moving um and it's interesting too at this particular point it did look like the center was going to go north of Corpus Christi and I was a little bit disappointed with that because I thought well the weather station and the camera are going to be on the south side of the core but yo know what can you do but it was going to be at night i mean it was just ever more clear that this was going to be at night right so yep we got the camera system running there at Port Oconor and we called it off and I did a lot of tweeting and posting of the weather station down there uh on the Oso Bay
Corpus Christi and I'm going to save this screenshot for you right out of the app and uh this was um or is picture

number 15 and you know what it was doing
really well this is 1:11 p.m central time and uh the wind was 42 gusting to

52 pressure down to 998 and uh a good live shot uh this is

just a cropped you'll see when you look at the picture but it was the the the live cam was doing great um and uh
everything was it was doing as well as we could expect for uh for what was
happening now the next part of this is
starting to come into focus you know part two is
getting there like okay and I'm going to save this for you too this is real this is historic this is one of those ones like a like that a newspaper that somebody saves from an important event like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or whatever
weatherwise this is right up there it really is that's not hyperbolic for me to say that and let me read it to yo and you'll understand this is a screenshot that I did where I cropped the hazards affecting land part of the public advisory for Harvey that
afternoon and here it is rainfall harvey
is expected to produce total rain accumulations of 15 to 30 in and
isolated maximum amounts of 40 inches over the middle and upper Texas coast through next Wednesday all right so this is
Friday Saturday you see where I'm going like
this was be like hey look the landfall
is going to be bad but it's going to be
at night there's nothing we can do i'm not sitting out there in the core of this thing at night we're probably not going to be able to do the weather balloon unless it stalls and goes so slow that

it's over land and still has a um a decent eye at sunrise we started thinking about that possibility we'll come back around to that but yeah I'm like look we're going to do the best we can with part one but when it's at night I'm very limited and Mark and company do
not sit in vehicles in category 3 or four hurricanes at night we try not to do it during the day anymore unless we have a viable chance to launch that weather balloon you got to have a purpose just not sitting out there i made that distinction you know that declaration sorry during Charlie yo remember that there's a little fbomb there i'm not effing ever doing this again or whatever no I'm not going to do that down in Texas at night anyway 40
ines of rain and ladies and gentlemen that was too low as you might know for those of you that know how this turned out it was more than 40 in anyway during
the same time they said uh Harvey is expected to produce total rain accumul accumulations of 5 to 15 ines in far south Texas and the Texas Hill Country
um and it says "Rainfall of this magnitude will cause catastrophic and
lifethreatening flooding." And I was not
going to botch that you know I wanted to make sure that we were all over uh the top of this all over it just stay on top of it houston one of the most important cities in the country i wanted to make sure we were ready so I called off putting up any more cameras uh and we went back to

the hotel and chilled you know like Alice was fine
hardly even windy and stuff's open might
have gotten something to eat i don't know but we were pretty much done for
setting stuff up and I thought we'll just kind of wait we kind of see how things shake out maybe we'll venture out
uh in the evening toward Rockport
somewhere down there and as the eyewall gets closer we'll head out we'll get back we knew our routes we knew like how
to do that safely and whatever so um I
think that was the right call cuz I really didn't have a choice to be honest with you and so we went back to the hotel might have even gotten a nap although I doubt it i think at this point in time stuff's ramped up so much lots of website stuff probably did a video discussion i'm still working but we're just not going to put out any more equipment so we get up to the early

evening time and uh let's look at the 5:00 p.m eastern advisory and um there

we go i'll save this one because this is pretty extraordinary now it is a category 3 winds are 125 i'll save this

picture this is picture number 16 I do believe and winds are 120 this picture
17 sorry apparently um winds are

1:25 and uh it's still off the coast so

yeah uh this is 400 p.m central and it's
got several hours to go still says moving northwest at 10 but I mean it it it had to be slowing down and it came to a crawl once it did make landfall so our
plan here for the evening was to very
carefully head back out into the elements carrie would follow along with Todd and their truck i had the Tahoe we had the animometer on there and wind readings and the pressure sensor and yo know just go out and do a little bit of spot recon stuff fairly close to the
coast and when that eyewall got you know
uncomfortably close and we can see it on radar obviously uh and we were pretty lucky too because the weather service office is right there in Corpus Christi uh so that was good it wasn't like the radar site was far away and you had sort of that weird attenuated image or whatever um but yeah we were going to be very cautious about it leave Alice and
head in towards Corpus may maybe get
down near Rockport or something like that but that really wasn't the plan um
I wanted to make sure that we were very close to the interstate system big four
lane you know so that we could move about you have a nice wide area of of highway none of that two-lane stuff yo
know where trees could come down because you know even in those outer bands all you need is one big tree to come down behind you and you're stuck and then the surge comes up and then you're in deep trouble so that was the idea let's just
get out do what we can and once that thing gets too close uh for comfort we
will retreat and make our way back to
Alice and see what happens you know and be ready to go pick everything up on
Saturday uh if conditions allowed and
that would certainly be interesting in and of itself so we did we left just as
it was getting dark and of course at
this point Harvey has become a category

4 now let's see what time that was because I tweeted it at um 6:00 p.m 6

p.m uh on the dot and that must have

been on their update too the 7:00 intermediate advisory or whatever but my post was just when you thought it couldn't get any worse it does harvey is now a category 4 hurricane
and so we decided again let's head out
be very careful about it see what kind of data we can get on the Tahoe we can tweet stuff I can take videos and yeah we'll still do something but we're not going to get down to Rockport and Fulton and all that and and risk our lives it's just not worth it and I was tweeting about the very real possibility that we
could consider launching the weather balloon in the morning because the eye
of Harvey was getting very very clear very defined which is bad on one hand
that means it's intensifying but that could mean that we would have a chance to launch the balloon if it's still intact once the sun came up in fact I had posted a picture screenshot from Radar Scope of that very well-defined
eye that was now sitting just offshore
of Rockport Fulton Portertoanis and I mean it's a category 4 it's 130 mph slowing down now moving northwest at
8 and we were like "All right you know
we're still in Alice uh Todd and Carrie and me it's right at 7:00 that's the time stamp on the the radar scope picture i'll save it here this is picture number 18 and I figured all right let's get going the sun's pretty much set it's going down it's you know that weird dark bluish gray color to the
evening sky um kind of breezy and rainy
on the far western reaches of Harvey
circulation and I said "All right let's go ahead and go east and head toward Corpus we'll go around Corpus Christi
and we're going to keep that eye in the eyewall due east of us at all
times and as soon as we get into an area
that um starts to lose power you start
seeing a bunch of power flashes as that eyewall comes in we're hightailing it back we're not going to get into that eyewall i was very strict about that i mean you just cannot mess around with this stuff and the next part of this story highlights that very well all right so we leave uh Alice we go down

Highway 44 to the east and I'm thinking
why don't we try to make our way over to this little town uh called Cinton um

again going kind of around Corpus Christi to the west we could get up to Cinton that's along 69E 69e is a nice

big wide interstate um and then we could

go down 181 towards Gregory and

Engleside and eventually over to Aran's Pass if we wanted to not that I I
thought that'd be a bad idea but we had options but Cinton was the goal and that
would keep us basically due west west

northwest whatever the Texas coast is southwest to northeast oriented so it's it's strange just not due north and due south and all that but we would keep that eye and the eyewall comfortably off
to our east and we would have an easy escape route back down to the southwest
through ODM and eventually back over to
44 and go back to Alice and I wasn't
going to play chicken with this thing so we're moving along and I wanted to do some spot readings every once in a while pull over and if there was a particularly heavy band coming in on radar we'd take some wind readings note it streaming live on either YouTube or Ustream um you know certainly tweeting stuff what have you and around 7:50 that
evening central time I get a text
message with a screenshot with it an image with it from my very longtime friend met him in 1999 Mike Ty extreme nature is his
handle on Twitter worldrenowned nature
photographer famous for tornado shots um
goes with some of those extreme stormchasing tours now he's got a family like I do uh not as nearly as many kids as me i think he's up to two children now um but he was recently married in
2017 he had just gotten married uh and

he had flown out there kind of late uh
got there that day like couple hours earlier several people did that they underestimated what Harvey was going to do and they left late and some people missed it couldn't completely because they just didn't believe that it was going to do much um but that's neither here nor there but uh you know sometimes that happens right but he flew in and he
rented a car they didn't have any SUVs apparently and he was driving down
35 and uh he sent me this text again
around 7:50 p.m and he said you know
"Hey Mark um I need help i've crashed my
car i've wrecked i'm injured i need help
can you come get me?" And I was hell and gone from where he was like it was just not especially with that eyewall coming in like there was literally nothing I could do it wasn't oh I'm not going to i'm I'm too chicken it was just not possible uh you would have had another somebody me and Carrie and Todd all of us would have been in serious trouble because Ty had wrecked his car north of

Fulton out there in the marshes of 35
Highway 35 but he he also said "Please don't
post this on Twitter or whatever like keep this you know if you know people or if you can help me he said he texted a few other people but he said "Don't put it on social media i don't want to scare the hell out of my wife." And I mean it was not even like I didn't even think about it it was just immediate uh I
responded and I said "Dude we love yo too much." Because he was he's a was and
still is a legend right and the nicest guy i cannot I mean no way I'm gonna let
him just Okay well I can't get you so
good luck you're damn right I was going to put it out there on Twitter because
stormchasers hurricane chasers whatever yeah they're a competitive group absolutely but when one of their own is in trouble especially somebody as highly
regarded as Ty um they're going to help him and I figured somebody is going to be out there and they're going to be able to to help him you know I figured all the chasers that have probably holed up in Fulton and Rockport there will be somebody that'll be able to go north and and rescue him and that's exactly what happened so I'm going to save the uh the

picture the tweet if you will from uh me

um I'm going to screenshot it and save it because that is a tweet for the ages
all right so this will literally be like a screenshot of my laptop as picture number 19 so check that out but I said quote "Alert any chasers or media can you help Mike Ty?" And I tagged him extreme nature he has crashed here
please retweet he's in danger because Ty had sent me a screenshot of his location
he was trying to get to the Fairfield Inn and uh suites in Fulton Rockport

area and uh crashed his car uh he was
upside down in the marsh his arm was injured it was not good and uh several
people were able to get out there and and rescue him and believe it or not
they brought him into the hotel down there and he still you know did what he does best he documented the hurricane and his arm was fine and the car was totaled um and whatever but that was
that was a scary moment it really was you know one of our own uh but it shows you like stuff can happen and he was in a a sedan it was a car and probably

going fast you know I get it um and he
said a gust of wind got him cuz the eyewall was just like couple dozen miles
offshore you know and that northnortheast wind just whapped him and got him into the marsh and that was it a
very very lucky guy but he got rescued and and uh life went on right so um we

also went on Carrie and Todd and myself
inching our way along taking wind readings when we could and stuff like that and we were uh out
on um 77
uh which is the is that an interstate or a highway but I was tweeting this that's why I'm wondering uh where is 77 on here

there's 37 yeah yeah so Highway
7769E pretty much the same thing and I remember I tweeted this i said "I'm out on 77 and I'm seeing semi-truckss going by at 55 mph." And we were getting 53
mph cross winds and I was like "Dude yo
know we just got a guy rescued we don't need anybody else getting hurt." And um
here's what I'm going to do too i'm going to screenshot this for you because
it's a video i can finally show you a video by by virtue of a screenshot it's
a a video that I had posted it said um
I'm on the side of 77 near Corpus Christi and there it is i mean the wind was 54 55 sustained and the gust there was uh

in the 50s you know like it it was really getting it and these trucks are going by at like 55 miles per hour still
just boggles my mind like don't you know there's a cat 4 hurricane coming so I'm going to save this picture for you as well in fact let me do that now before
cuz when you screenshot something yo know you got to do it or you forget about it and then it's gone all right there we go uh so this is picture number
what will this be what are we up to number 20 I think it is um yes picture

number 20 nice little screenshot there
of uh our weather instruments in the Tahoe

when it was pretty darn gusty out there on 77 so we move along and um we finally

get to Sentin and you know the the

hurricane is slowing down even more um
like it's just getting worse and worse and worse it really is and we pull into

this gas station there's another chaser there i don't remember who he was we talked to him for a bit couple of truckers had pulled in it was a pretty big gas station u posted some video from
that which is you know it's okay there's some power flashes or whatever tweeted things getting interesting here in Centon Texas um and we just sat there I
don't know for maybe an hour and we're just waiting and you could hear the wind roaring you could look off in the distance see the power flashes you could smell you know broken trees in the air
it's a very distinct smell if you've never been through it I'm telling yo you just know like man that is all that energy just breaking the trees and yo can just smell the freshly cut wood basically that's what it is um and then I tweeted out you know kind of an important stat
4,324 that's how many days since the
last time this had happened October 24th
2005 that was the last time and I
thought this is pretty profound of me if I may say so myself i said when that
happened that was Wilma October 24th '05 4,324 days ago we had no iPhone no

Twitter no s social media no sushi
either no social media uh as we know it

today that's remarkable you know it had
been 12 years since the last major hurricane and Harvey was going to end the streak it was just a matter of time so it was neat because we were able to post this data you know like wind
readings pressure readings whatever so the air pressure where we were was 994
millibars in Centon and it was 943
millibars in Rockport because the eye was now making landfall at this point in time let's see what time I tweeted this um this was 9:57 so I guess at this point just want to make sure I got this right uh maybe I saw somebody else's you know post or something but um I do want to make sure I get this right so uh this is the what time is this this is the
10:00 advisory and Harvey is essentially
making landfall at that point northwest
at 7 so yeah it's it's slowing down um
I'm just looking at the graphic here so I don't have the the text output unfortunately but maybe I was reading an air pressure from somebody maybe Morgan posted it i don't know but 943 mibars in

Rockport again I got that from somewhere
so it's basically a 51 mibar gradient or

difference in pressure over distance between where we are in Sentin and Rockport 51 millibars that gradient and I said "No wonder it's so windy." So
that's funny or not but anyway um so we

stayed there for just a little while longer and decided all right you know

we've had enough um got to get back to
the hotel try to get some sleep because
August 26 begins part two you know of this epic

saga and I didn't miss part one but

darkness screwed me over once again we
had the one camera up there in Porto Oconor some storm surge came up uh yo
could hear it at night it ran fine but you couldn't see anything i mean it was like a roaring sound and then we had our camera and the weather station on the south side pretty far away now you know the you know when all was said and done the weather station and the camera at Oso Bay south side of Corpus Christi Bay
and um you know again it's dark whatever
uh but you know you take the loss so to speak and it's not really a defeat what are you going to do it's dark but that was my that's my point like okay we did
the best we could we stayed safe and
we're going to live to fight another day and we're going to nail this thing up in Houston and it ended up we being me
we're going to cover that in part two but that's it part one of the landfall
everything it It's onshore broke the streak at 4,324 days all that and uh we make our
way back to Alice and I was able to get
some sleep and I did think a little bit about maybe we'll get up in the morning and um I know we're going to get up in the morning but maybe get up and try to launch the weather balloon but the eye of the hurricane did start to fill and
you know where it kind of just collapses on itself uh but boy it was just
crawling in there very slow movement
made landfall over Rockport Fulton area Portoanzis category 4 extreme damage
down there you name it at night a lot of chasers at those hotels there in Rockport it was like a convention um and
even all their footage was at night yo know there's only so much you can do so again I thought all right let's get some sleep we'll get up and we'll get out there and carefully try to get back i figured it'd be pretty easy to get the weather station and the camera from Oso Bay uh south side of Corpus but you know
Port Okconor we had no idea cuz the camera eventually did go offline but it did do as well as could be expected under the circumstances of course it was dark anyway darn hurricanes making landfall at night that just makes it so difficult so we all went back to the hotel or at least I went to my hotel uh
Carrie and Todd went back to their respective uh apartments or whatever in the Houston area and we all got some sleep because we're going to have to hit the ground running hard the next day the 26 Saturday August 26th 2017

we were not sure what kind of a world was awaiting us out there in you know
the areas like Rockport and Fulton but uh we would venture out and we'd go get the weather station and the camera system from the south side of Corpus Christie Bay Oso Bay area and then make
our way up uh 35 around you know the
west side of Corpus and then eventually through Rockport and Fulton and uh try
to get up to Port Okconor was all waiting for us on that Saturday and then

and we're going to cover this in part two of the Harvey saga the Houston
catastrophe was waiting we just didn't know how bad had no idea of what was
coming i mean we had the guidance and everything and the numbers 30 40 50 ines
of rain maybe but what that would eventually look like and how that would play out I know I wasn't prepared for it it it certainly sticks with me as one of probably the top three most memorable events of my career you got Katrina in there you got Michael in there sandy somewhere in that conversation as well maybe some of these are tied but yeah uh
when we get to part two here the the catastrophic flooding it is really going to be something and I can't wait to bring you those stories all right well that does it for this episode i think we're good for now next time around again we'll get into part two of this incredible saga of Hurricane Harvey i am Mark Sith forced away from the hurricane highway as always thanks for tuning in i'll talk to you again real soon