[Music]

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 core came in on Shore here along the Southeast coast of
these little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that
[Music] surge hello again and welcome to another edition of stories from the hurricane highway I am your host Mark suth great to be here with you again and thank yo for tuning in and listening to me we're going to have a great one this time a spectacular episode hopefully all of
them are this one though is very special because I'm going to leave the country for a field mission First International trk to capture a hurricane and that would be in Bermuda for Hurricane Gonzalo and what an adventure it was
having to figure out how to pack all this gear take it over there how do I navigate an area that I've never been to before you know who am I going to work with and then just deal with what would end up being a pretty powerful hurricane outside of the United States a lot of challenges um but it was very successful
and a lot of stories to tell yo especially off of Twitter I was looking back through that as part of my show preparation and the amount of tweets that I was putting out for the Gonzalo Mission uh almost equated to live tweeting basically it was crazy definitely took advantage of that platform also streamed live while I was over in Bermuda so that was exciting met a bunch of great people some of whom I am still friends with even today and uh
just an exciting time as I left the US
for the first time ever to go intercept a hurricane but before we get to Gonzalo let's just take a step back and look at the 2014 season as a whole and up to
this point where are we of course I had spent the couple weeks out in the Southwest United States dealing with Norbert and odal those East Pacific hurricanes and we talked about how busy the East Pack season was but the Atlantic season not so much not even
close we only had eight named storms in

the Atlantic Basin in 2014 eight that's
it that's when I was reading back through everything I almost had to do a double take like wait that's not right it is right we had eight we started with Arthur we ended with Hannah and in between you know we had Fay and Gonzalo
that impacted Bermuda we'll talk about those two very close in time too by the way um but other than that the Atlantic

season really was below average overall we had about the the average number of hurricanes and uh Gonzalo was the strongest by the way at 145 miles per hour category 4 but that was it I mean
the East pack was definitely dominating
overall all right so not a very busy 2014 season but it did give us Gonzalo
and I would go to Bermuda for that but you know I was looking back at everything thinking all right how do I want to set everything up and what kind of History do I want want to bring into this because you think about Bermuda uh wonderful area and um been
there you know the Island's been there as a uh a settled entity for hundreds of
years it's not just one Island by the way it's made up of several islands um you do have what they call the main island of Bermuda so for the sake of Simplicity for the rest of this episode we will refer to Bermuda as singular an
island all right you know like the noun the place name of Bermuda that's what that's what we'll call it that just makes it easier but I just want you to know it is in fact made up of many different islands all right so Bermuda impacted by hurricanes over the eons obviously it looks like a fish hook from
satellite if you look at it on a map and it's oriented Southwest to Northeast in the Atlantic uh and it's got its share of
hurricanes right it looks like a fish hook it's captured caught many a hurricane over the hundreds and hundreds of years millions of years whatever that Bermuda has been there but since settlement times you know I think it's best to at least for this episode because we could spend an hour going over the entirety of Berita hurricane history I want to look back at a couple of them of these hurricane uh impacts that get us up to where we're
going to go here in 2014 and the first one is Fabian and if you're in Bermuda
you're listening to this and you lived there during 03 you remember Fabian very powerful hurricane out over the Atlantic everybody was wondering of course once it came off Africa late August is it
going to make it around the Bermuda High azor's Bermuda high do they do those high pressure areas couple up you get a big strong subtropical Ridge and it comes to the United States or the Caribbean or whatnot and it didn't yo
know and we were tracking it and we don't know this early on even today the computer guidance is still hard to know what's going to happen even within 5 days sometimes much less Beyond 5 days
so in 03 it became evident that Fabian

would turn towards Bermuda and in fact it did and it caused uh pretty extensive

damage there um it uh reading this from
Wikipedia it was the strongest hurricane Fabian was to hit Bermuda since 1963 and
that was hurricane arleene it was both the most damaging and the first hurricane to cause a death on the island since 1926 Fabian so Fabian killed four people

in Bermuda uh because they had gotten out on that Causeway that connects the main island of Bermuda to St George's Island where the airport is and the weather service out there by the way um but it
also killed four people in the US Mainland who drowned in you know wave and uh rip current

related activity impacts which I find to
be pretty uh remarkable obviously in the
negative sense that you know they get a direct hit in Bermuda from this Category 3 hurricane four people died and they
just shouldn't have been on the causeway I think it goes without saying it is what it is but then hundreds of miles away West in the US four people also
died from IND indirect impacts further I

think underscoring the need to understand what you're up against with these impacts you know and that's what we try to do here is is let people get
the totality of dealing with tropical Cyclones try to understand all of it if
we can that's a big part of our messaging anyhow that was 03 that was
Fabian it also by the way threatened the
endangered Bermuda petrol and they had to move some nests volunteers to help that species to survive it's a pretty big deal um $300 million in damage
overall eight deaths in total four in Berita four on the mainland of the United States now the next one I remember we had 1963 with arleene out
there in Bermuda and then it was not until all the way in 2003 all right then it's only seven
years until the next one and that's where we're going here it's like wait a minute we're getting closer and closer to these strikes happening you know the distance between in time is getting less
so from 03 to 2010 is seven years right

and we have eigor and eigor was a huge
hurricane uh didn't bring a lot of rain to Bera and rainfall is pretty much the
way they get most of their fresh water through an elaborate Roof System that collects the rain into these ssts or tanks um but eigor you know was pretty
frightening a huge hurricane looked like it could really be a big problem kind of slow moving as it got towards Bermuda did produce a storm surge there of uh almost 2 feet the storm tide when yo have the surge plus the high tide was a little over 4 feet and uh shut down the airport lots of tourists had to leave in
anticipation of eigor and that has a an
economic toll of course uh luckily no injuries no deaths in berm
because of eigor that's a good thing and it did not make landfall directly so I want to make that clear Fabian did but
eigor did not it came close but it
didn't make landfall up but but it was a significant impact so that's important to know as we get through you know the beginning here kind of setting everything up what is some of the modern hurricane history of Bermuda now let's fast forward to 2014 all right so if my

math is correct I'm being factious here

uh 2010 with eigor to 2014 when we had
Fay that's only four years right so we
go from 63 to 03 to 10 to 14 and then we

had Fay and then we had Gonzalo very close to each other Fay was
on um trying to think here let's see the

10th 11th somewhere around there the 13th it's when it degenerated so let's see fully
tropical it um yeah so making landfall

just reading making sure I got my facts straight f is on October 12th and uh
Gonzalo is like the 17th or something so we're really closing the distance here
in time and I'm sure people in berm are just like enough of that and then by the way way in 2016 it keeps on happening
what was it Nicole we'll get there I didn't go back there for Nicole but anyway so yeah we had fa so let's talk about Fay real quick um and I'll just read this right off of Wikipedia it'll just be helpful it's just two paragraphs so Fay originated from a low-level disturbance and it was originally subtropical you know so it's more spread out the convection not as concentrated around the center you know subtropical I
like to look at it as another way of saying hybrid all right uh and that was on October 10th and it was about 615 Mi
south of Bermuda it was on a north-northwest track around a mid-level Ridge across the central Atlantic and the system became dislocated from a cord
cold core low and allowing it to uh

become fully tropical again where the convection is now more centered around the core or any kind of a center on the 11th fake continued to strengthen in spite of excessively strong wind shear as it accelerated North Northeast and by the way usually when these systems are moving with the shear the sheer Vector as we call it it's not sheer I mean
sheer is typically the wind speed change in Direction with height and these hurricanes we're learning this more and more you know and Fay was a good example of this when they move with the shear kind of like Wilma did an ' 05 then it's not as much Shear you know so if the shear is 30 knots out of the Southwest but the Hurricane's moving Northeast yo know so that means that it's going from Southwest to Northeast at 10 knots

that's what 12 13 mil hour then your effective Shear is really only 20 knots anyway that matters so Fay was moving with the shear basically and um it began

to strengthened and became a full-on hurricane at 80 mph and actually made
landfall in in Bermuda uh on the 11th uh 12th of October sorry and um it was uh you know

a modest strength storm hurricane 80 mph

category 1 but it did produce relatively extensive damage in Bermuda uh there were clogged roadways with trees and power lines down and a majority of the islands uh electricity customers had no power and I did remember reading this the terminal building at the airport
which is the Wade International Airport was flooded because it compromised part of the roof and sprinkler system and immediately after the storm 200 berm soldiers were called in to clear the debris and assist with initial damage repairs Etc so um let's see it

uh also uh $3.8 million in damage just

kind of reading as it um as I wrap this part up here there were concerns though this is what's important here that the debris from Fay could become airborne during Gonzalo and exacerbate future
destruction because Gonzalo was on the
radar so to speak so this hits on the 12th gonzalo's on the 17th that's five
days 177 something like that right so
yeah pretty busy in Bermuda uh as we

were in the early part of the 2010s
right so 2010 2014 things are going wild in

Bermuda all right back now with stories from the hurricane Highway discussing Hurricane Gonzalo and the events that led up to that great adventure of mine
to Bermuda all right so it looks like the first mention that I made in October
that things were getting ready to really pick up again I had come back from the desert Southwest and a lot of work out there with Norbert and odal missions now
I'm back we get into October and it looks like on the 10th here I tweeted quote and just like that hurricane season is back end quote and uh there's a lot of tweets on the 10th actually the next one uh tropical wave east of the ler Antilles is now inv bestest area 90l
and that would go on to become Gonzalo furthermore on the 10th I tweeted that the euro is going bananas with a favorable mjo signal for the Atlantic Basin over the next two weeks and um I
did a lot of tweeting on the 10th first ships run that's the the statistical
hurricane model ships uh for 9l brings it to Hurricane intensity rather quickly this one Bears watching then we also had
a depression it was subtropical in nature and again just to remind you that me means that the thunderstorms in the organization is just more Loosely defined kind of a hybrid system and I even said here um in my tweet NHC
upgrades subtropical depression 7 to
subtropical storm Fay and what is
subtropical I said think of it as a mut
also on the 10th lots of tweets that day looks like winds will Top out near 50 mph in the coming days with Fay as it nears Bermuda large wind field that's
part of it being subtropical obviously that was wrong I
was wrong in that tweet the hurricane Center's forecast was too low and
Bermuda indeed had to deal with a hurricane it made landfall as I talked about as a hurricane on October 11th after Fay P passes close to Bermuda the
region might have to deal with another tropical threat late next week that would be 90 L which would eventually of course go on to become uh Gonzalo so

looking at gonzalo's track and its overall history very interesting it started out east of the Lesser end tiles

and move steadily West looking like it was going to cross the Northeast Caribbean now early on I remember this
so vividly there was a pretty good
consensus in the guidance that it would pass very close to Northeastern Puerto Rico so I originally booked a plane

ticket booked a hotel over on the east
side of Puerto Rico I was going to fly into Sam Juan and report on Gonzalo in

Puerto Rico I would do this for the Weather Channel and of course I would take a live cam or two with me I think a
couple of GoPros something like that and stay at a Hilton property I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head but it was in the EAS part of Puerto Rico um I mean it might have been
like a Ritz Carlton or something I don't know it was very expensive it looked
really nice and I felt like I could be secure there and I mean I had everything lined up I booked everything um the airline stuff I think
through Expedia if I'm not mistaken and
of course I booked my Hilton Hotel through my Hilton app and I was ready to go I alerted The Weather Channel and um

there was like sort of a chain of command I reported to a gentleman named Tom Lee and would you know email him uh

and I think I would copy a couple of other people if I'm not mistaken back in the day um and that would be uh sort of
the higher ups from Tom Norah and David

you know Nora zamet and David Clark I
don't know Norah's exact title I could look it up but it's neither here nor there but those were the three they're kind of like my bosses if you will they wanted to know what I'm going to do when I'm going to do it and then they would pass this information along to producers and the control room and yo
know Bookers and stuff like that so that I could do phone interviews and Skype interviews I know
we used Skype um back in the day to do

video Even and it was generally all set
and I remember I booked it fairly early and I want to go through my Twitter here and see if I can pick up on when I did that uh so we're still on

the 11th still talking about Fay it's almost a hurricane is it near as Bermuda 9 L also coming together so forth so
let's just scroll through my Twitter here all right so on the 12th tropical storm Gonzalo forms east of the Caribbean watches and warnings issued all right here it is right here perfect this is again why I love Twitter so much that it stores everything and um I wonder if years from now when people are listening to this podcast if it'll go back to being called Twitter officially
from Elon or whoever else might own it we'll see that'll be an interesting test of time I'm always going to call it Twitter I'm sorry or I'm not sorry right isn't that the expression sorry not sorry anyway I tweeted on the 12th
headed to Sam Juan tomorrow to cover what could be hurricane G Alo for The Weather Channel small system has potential to ramp up quickly and I kept mentioning it and uh oh I even talked about that I was going to take my weather station with me the rmy young and pressure sensor uh setup um which is very hard to do yo
know the RM young anomet you'll see pictures of it as we get through here cuz I took it to Bermuda but I mean it looks like a torpedo you know like a
shoulder fired missile or something it's U it's called an arrow vean and it sits on top of a mast and it's got sensors in it called a potentiometer amongst other things and you get uh wind data and
Direction and all kinds of good stuff and we had a nice little setup that various people had helped me to develop over the years and all of the equipment needed to run this was in a pretty small Pelican case um kind of like double the
thickness of a briefcase but about the same dimension and there would be a little laptop in there a little Acer laptop a 45 amp hour

um like golf cart battery and various
wires and connectors and an inverter and
all that kind of stuff cigarette lighter adapter you know it worked um and I was
going to take that amongst other things to Puerto Rico and so I'm watching
everything and by later in the day on
the 12th as it as the day progresses um I say on Twitter overall
the National Hurricane Center says that the track envelope for Gonzalo has shifted e some puts Puerto Rico less at

risk now puts them at less of a risk and
that continues on the Windfield is not
very large because Gonzalo down here in the Deep Tropics is a small compact system and I'm tweeting back to people they're talking to me uh this one guy named markk uh from Washington DC he was asking me about it and I said well I just I wonder how close it gets to Puerto Rico I will be on the extreme Northeastern tip oh here it is I said it at the El Conquistador
Hotel I thought that was a Hilton property I could look it up but I think it is Hilton but anyway um and so by the

like later in the day on the let's see what time I tweeted that cuz this is really important um so it was the 12th into of the 13th cuz I tweeted that at 1:00 in the morning now I remember this yes that was
1:00 at the in the morning that I responded to this guy Mark um who was
you know asking me about it and so forth so that was 1:00 a.m. and by 8:56 a.m. I

guess I finally went to bed right I tweeted quote Gonzalo keeping me home for now hope I made the right call we'll
wait and see if Bermuda is the next chance so I
cancelled um my Puerto Rico trip yo

know I'm like nope not going to do it and Expedia I was able to cancel the airline ticket I think it was within that 24-hour Magic Window the hotel was
not a problem um and like it was all
good from my end I emailed the Weather
Channel and I told them hey look I don't think this is going to get close enough to Puerto Rico to Warrant the time and expense for me to go there it's going to be a non-event that's what I really feel I'm looking at the data you know and yo got to understand I think you guys know this about me during Hurricane Season when we have one of these out there that's all I'm looking at you know and The Weather Channel or any news organization they've got a lot of other stuff going on too right so they're looking you they got their tropical people um they had uh Michael Lowry and
Brian Norcross and they're looking at it close too but I mean for me in terms of a mission I am scrutinizing every little

micro detail especially when it comes to something like traveling out of the country it has to be you know worthwhile

on a lot of levels especially to that I'm going by myself so I
cancelled my plans to go to Puerto Rico

and um I'm trying to look and see
here uh I was talking to John Morales um

he's down in uh Miami very famous John

Morales popular well
respected um he might be retired now but
he was at NBC 6 now well he's a hurricane specialist for him I know he was more full-time back then actually interacted with him and NBC 6 during Katrina in the Florida landfall back in 2005 a little trivia for yo
anyway I tweeted to him because he and I were talking about it apparently that
this is a profession what we're doing here with meteorology and should I go or should I not you'll understand as I explain this that this profession allows you to see your alternate future did I make the right call I will be up late to see and
what I meant by that is again I'm not

going and this makes sense right so I
get to actually see what it would have been like you know had I gone there in
other words did I make the right call I
will know and I can see if that alternate reality was the right one does that make sense I hope so because by not going Gonzalo is still going to do whatever it's going to do and if it's pretty far to the east hey I made the right call I didn't miss anything but if it goes over or really close to Northeast Puerto Rico it develops a core and just whatever and it's a pretty big deal down there I see that reality and I
missed it my alternate reality is one that I can see play out it's really interesting how that works it's kind of like the old saying you know well yo never know because you didn't go or whatever and they've made movies about it I'm sure you know where you can see what would have happened had I taken that train or you know it's the old time tested tale of you know an alternate reality had you made a certain decision
and the reason I'm harping on it so much is I got an email back from The Weather

Channel and one of the people that I report to there one of the three was not very happy with my decision um they were
like you've got to alert all through of
us about any changes you have to have our approval and you know we were counting on you going to Puerto Rico and now you're not going it kind of throws everything into chaos and I'm like well I assure you to the best of how you know
how certain I was that me going to Puerto Rico would have been a big waste of time it was probably going to be sunshine and butterflies over there in the Northeast tip and I am going to
serve you know a better purpose going to
Bermuda potentially in a few days yo
know anytime you travel outside of the US especially on short notice it's very expensive certainly sometimes it's expensive even if if you have months of notice so you know that was kind of weird um kind of getting admonished or whatever from um The Weather Channel and
it wasn't a real big deal but it was like a little bit of a you know took the wind out of my sales a little bit as they say and um I was like look you got to trust my judgment here I could more than make up for it in Bermuda assuming that Gonzalo does in fact go to Bermuda
so I start watching really close as yo can imagine you know did I make the right bet you know it's like putting everything on red on roulette I guess I mean it wasn't that dramatic um but it
was like okay cuz you know I had talked about it on social media I'm probably going to Puerto Rico I am going to Puerto Rico now I'm not going to Puerto Rico and kind of stuff happens when you're dealing with tropical Cyclones and the uncertainties that are inherent and then when you're talking about Islands yo know the United States if one's going to hit the US I just adjust accordingly but when you're talking about Islands um that's a that's a harder game to play so to speak so I'm watching really closely
over the next few days the 12th the 13th and so forth Gonzalo does in fact turn

pretty well to the northeast of Puerto Rico there was a hurricane warning up for the British Virgin Islands but only a hurricane watch for Puerto Rico they never went under a hurricane warning and I think it's funny here that on the 13th I'm tweeting about the heading that's
like really important to me because yo know du West is 270 and I was also tweeting about the wind speed so on October 13th let's see
what time of day this was 10:53 a.m. I
tweeted Gonzalo Gonzalo now moving West Northwest with 65 mph winds heading is
now 290 so it's 20° on a compass north

of du West all right and then not long
after I tweet it again looks to me like the center of Gonzalo will pass close to St Martin and anguila over the next few
hours heading is 295 degrees now so I'm
really really honing in on that like come on Miss Puerto Rico like I don't want even tropical storm conditions there uh and I talk about how this spells much better news for Puerto Rico and probably for the Virgin Islands Gonzalo close to being a hurricane now won't be long and I was mentioning to some other people on um Twitter about
you know how you know I'd be sitting down there in my hotel doing nothing
because it really wasn't that close I made the right call In The End by not going to Puerto Rico that would have cost $7 to $800 just for the plane
ticket and I would have been by myself dealing with a rental car dealing with a place that I'd never been to before of course Puerto Rico is a US Territory so it's you know not leaving the United
States per se but it is certainly leaving the mainland and I've never been there before finally later on the 13th
Gonzalo becomes a hurricane the 6th one of the season and the ace is going to
start to crank up a little bit now uh the a score which is already basically
going to be higher than 2013 which is not hard to do um 2013 had what 36 Ace

points or something total so the Atlantic's getting there the mjo is more favorable now we've got Gonzalo but also very interesting over in the
Central Pacific we have a Central
Pacific name they name theirs outside of
the East Pacific Basin so you have the East Pacific with their set of names the Central Pacific their set of names and the West pack and then the westpack gets even more confusing because you have the JMA out of Japan and then sometimes
Philippines uh pagasa I forget what that
acronym stands for um they take over
naming when a typhoon moves into their
area of responsibility anyhow we have a

a hurricane in the Central Pacific named Anna or Anna I guess it's a Ana that's
Anna and um it's threatening Hawaii

coming in from the southeast you know and that's typically how Hawaii gets hit is you got to bring these things in from the south and then turn them North quickly across the islands it's really
really hard to hit the islands perpendicular from the East you know eniki in 1992 cut across way over on the
west end of the The Chain by coming in from the southeast and then turning Northeast pretty quickly as a trough approached Anna looked like it could do something similar and it certainly brought a lot of rain to the area and had a lot of chatter on social media about it that wow we got Hawaii under the gun we got Gonzalo in the Atlantic threatening the Caribbean now it's going to head towards Bermuda so you know kind of all of a sudden the Western Hemisphere was pretty busy with tropical activity certainly the East pack was now the central Pacific and of course the Atlantic with Gonzalo so I'm watching

I'm tweeting about it posting on Hurricane track doing updates you name it we get into the let's see a lot of

tweets on the 13th here um of course now

remember we had fay fay being a hurricane impacting directly Bermuda and

I'm talking to different people one of these folks is David Bernard you guys surely know who that is uh let's see where David is now still um newly minted
social worker so he left television and weather but was with was he with WWL I
know he was in New Orleans and that's I guess what matters the most uh big name down there and he got out of the business recently uh but David Bernard back then was in television big fixture
in New Orleans and I was tweeting to him
about I wonder what the odds are of two hurricanes passing directly over Bermuda within 10 days of each other and that is remarkable folks remember what I told you before that it had been you know a
long time between hurricanes from um the
60s to when we finally had uh eigor and

then of course we had uh Fabian before
that you know Fabian 2003 um and now we're getting this really short distance between what we call return periods right uh Fay and then within 10 days Gonzalo looked like
it could be a direct threat to Bermuda
so I start looking at everything really closely we get up to the 14th and um the eye of Gonzalo becomes
pretty defined you can see it on San
Juan radar I'll make this one um I think
this is we're up to picture number two so let's save this one cuz this one is beautiful all right uh so G pick one I'm
just looking at my directory here this will be G pick two G for Gonzalo of
course so Gonzalo picture number two for you to reference really solid eye well
to the northeast of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and it certainly had the
potential to become a very strong hurricane it did make it eventually to category 4 and peaked out at 145

milph and it took aim on Bermuda and um

I was like all right I think I'm going to do this and I had to really think

hard about how to execute going to
Bermuda on the 14th I tweeted here new
GFS has Gonzalo quite close to Bermuda in about 3 Days Every mile will count
now and I also tweeted just after that on the 14th Pat patience is a virtue in so many ways I passed at the last minute
on Gonzalo in Puerto Rico hoping to
catch it in Bermuda and I guess I had made my choice headed out in the morning let's see when I tweeted that what time of day was that 3:21 in the afternoon so I would have alerted the Weather Channel
and let Tom and David and Nora know I'm

going to bermudo and they were very excited about it they were all right yo were right about Puerto Rico you know probably Sil they didn't tell me that but you know hopefully they understood that all right Mark's judgment was good and I'm thinking all right I'm going to go to Bermuda and I'm going to knock this out of the park and I do remember
Nora asking I think we did a conference call or something maybe it was in an email we didn't have zoom back then at least I don't think we did um anyhow um

maybe it was an email but she was wanting to know if I was going to bring some of those floating cams with me I thought that was really funny um like no

no I'm not bringing my floating cams it's called the drifting surge cam not a floating cam floating cams would come
several years later by accident especially seven years later in 2021 we
we'll get there but um I like no but I am going to bring a uh a GoPro with me
because I've got an idea and this ladies
and gentlemen really started like this
was the first time that I was going to play with you in a GoPro not in my hand

and I thought yeah I'm going to try to set up a couple of GoPros out somewhere

like close to the water like they'll run for I remember for the Herby project Carrie and I found a larger GoPro case
cuz back in 2014 I don't believe the GoPros yet were engineered to where yo
don't need a case they're submersible to 30 ft or whatever nowadays just naked
you go buy one at Walmart charge it up and you can go jump in the ocean with it or the hotel pool or whatever the case may be take it to the water park yo don't need a case necessarily and um yo
can get a case and you get this extra battery pack and all that stuff but in 2014 I think we were using like the Hero 3 or the three plus as they called it
and we found this little battery pack deal from GoPro I think it was called the battery backpack that would snap into place and you would get an extra hour or so maybe 90 minutes so that
extended the runtime I think we had about 4 hours of runtime on a GoPro with
this special pack that we got and of course a larger polycarbonate clear case
or whatever it was made out of and then it would attach to this little small handheld like a little monopod or a selfie stick so to speak about a foot tall and I thought I'll take a couple of these and Gorilla tape and CU we had
been using Gorilla Tape Carrie introduced me to Gorilla Tape nothing against duct tape but I'm telling yo folks Gorilla Tape is that's the key it

really is we're going to use Gorilla Tape a lot in the coming years from here on out um so I was starting to plan on
everything I told Nora and Tom and David you know here's what I'm going to do I'm going to take a weather station the full weather station the whole the anomet yo
know the little laptop a battery a little case um I'm going to take one

remote cam for the Logitech camera and

uh my iPhones I had two of them um one
that I had on Sprint I don't know if Sprint was part of T-Mobile yet in 2014 neither here nor there but and then I'd have my um what was that thing called it
was it was a little green one iPhone SE that Carrie had provided through his business account and I would be able to do calls and I'd be on the hotel Wi-Fi and I could do um Skype and

phoners with the Weather Channel so it was this pretty big plan I was going to take a lot and I got everything packed and decided upon based on recommendations from people like Greg Nordstrom and our good friend of the project Paul Bowman who had been to Bermuda for certainly Tim malar and
others that the place to go is grot Bay
Resort that's where you should be it's near the airport it's near the causeway the infamous Causeway and it's a it's a good location it's kind of on the northeast side of Bermuda and um that's

what I did I booked that through Expedia booked my Airline flight and I think I took Delta in this situation for what it's worth and I was ready to go so everything's packed up all set I'm GNA go and um I'm just kind of nervous about
it honestly you know I've never left the country before I'm by myself I didn't really know anybody there personally certainly right but

there was a guy from social media I think it was Twitter that he was emailing me and he had a friend there uh

who owned a solar power solar panel
business Bermuda solar or something like that and he said you ought to get in touch with my friend and maybe he can
help you out he's really into the weather he would be a great contact I was like oh really I appreciate that that is huge you know when people reach out and yes it is strange to work with
people you've never met before have them meet you at airports and have done that throughout my career um and you know
it's just the way it is you know you yo just hope that everything works out so far so good so um I agreed I like that

sounds great I I'll be in touch and um

off I went let's see what day I left here it was uh I say at the airport in Wilmington where to flight of Bermuda it's as uh a close a call I trying to read this here it's a close call as to
how significant the impacts will be only one way to find out um so I wrote that
at 6:14 in the morning boy I was in the
uh airport early wasn't I

and Jim Williams our good friend Jim Williams says that uh looks like the core will pass enough West to keep sustained hurricane force winds away this is on the 15th of October and I I like my response I said looks like that today what will it look like tomorrow I'm all in no matter what nothing ventured nothing gained of course now
you think about that what Jim said that was on the 15th it would make landfall on the 17th that's 2 days and you're
talking about an island that is not that big right or an island chain remember I said we're going to refer to Bermuda for Simplicity purposes as an island singularly even though it's made up of multiple Islands Islands but I was like you know I'm not going to worry about wobbles in the track and whatever it certainly isn't going to be like Puerto Rico where I to Bermuda and it's just
sunshine and and big waves I figured it'll be worth it to go so I head on out
fly of Philadelphia that was my connection and um the key was and I even
was uh speculating about this on Twitter
when does the Northeast turn happen
because Gonzalo is coming up from the south Southeast something like that it's very strong you know uh 130 mph

something like that I mean it's up there it's a cat 4 Solid hurricane and it is
dead aimed on Bermuda plus or minus a few miles so I'm getting kind of excited
here this could be a really big deal and
uh I'm in Philly like waiting to get to Bermuda I jump on the plane uh there in

Philadelphia and I'm going to find this picture I didn't tweet it uh I guess we didn't have Airborne internet over the ocean back then so I didn't tweet this
but I know I've got it in some of my archival stuff uh this will be picture number three by the way um and it is uh

the airplane the Delta flight and there's like me and five other people of course you know who's going to Bermuda when they're under a hurricane watch which at this point it should be just a watch right so I land and I get

to uh the airport and you got to go
through customs and I had airlin at least one very large case one

of my old pelican cases that used to house all the camera stuff right I had at least one of those
maybe I had two plus my roller bag I had

a lot and I'm going to tell you what going through customs was really interesting CU I had a couple of GoPros I had my handheld video camera two iPhones and then these remote cams their batteries which were not lithium these were the AGM sealed lead acid batteries or maybe
they're not lead acid but um they're sealed and so they're not lithium yo can you can Airline them and it's fine
um I think I had to pay a couple hundred dollar because everything weighed so much but you know had the budget from The Weather Channel to do it that's what the money is for uh but Customs was literally like it took a little while you know they were like okay what is all of this what are you doing and it was kind of like this weird thing people told me that I can't tell them that I'm

working for the Weather Channel or there could be some issues with taxes or
something like that that I had to tell them that I was there independently as a researcher and as a scientist which I am first you know I don't work for the Weather Channel back then like right now I don't work for Fox Weather I am on contract with them as an independent
contractor as a content provider I don't work for fox Corp you know I might get a check from them but same with the Weather Channel I didn't work for the Weather Channel I'm not on salary I don't have benefits um I think yo understand but it was like this interesting little while and they weren't sure about the anomer what's this for I like it's for the hurricane and it took about 15 minutes I think and

they had to get a supervisor to come over and part of it too I think something like they don't want you yo come in with all this Electronics yo look like one of those stores in New York City where they sell Electronics right there's just thousands of everything in there you can imagine that I'm not showing up on Bermuda um Hawking you know GoPros and

anemometers and whatever it was just funny I'm like no no no no I'm here to study the hurricane and um I report on my website and I had my business card you see I'm hurricanetrack.com uh I work
for myself which I do that was 100%
truthful so after a little bit I was
cleared and I I got a cart I remember I had this cart a little wagon thing and I
went out somehow I got a taxi and I was
so tired I going to tell you this I remember how dadgum tired I was I was so

tired like exhausted you can imagine the
night of the 14th into the 15th I probably didn't sleep worth a hoot knowing me nervous about everything
anxious and making sure I've got everything I need cuz I'm not going to Best Buy I'm not going to Lowe's there's none of that I do need to go to a little grocery store in Bermuda and get a few supplies I had brought a couple of snacks with me but nothing significant and um so I got there and I was exhausted and I remember I got to grot Bay it was only a few minutes away from the airport I took a picture it was beautiful this will be picture number four so let me save that one cuz this is a gorgeous shot uh Gonzalo Pick

4 uh and it's from the grot bay looking
out across the water from my room and
then I laid down and I was out I took a

nap and um I got up and I walked over to

I probably slept for about 90 minutes or something got up in the very late afternoon let me see what time I took that picture cuz that'll give me a clue yeah 2:06 p.m. um I don't know if that's
Bermuda time it doesn't matter but clearly it's a nice you know middle part of the day kind of shot you'll see when you look at it right so I took my nap you know one of those like I have got to lay down or I'm going to just die right and just kind of sleep off the day it's kind it's like like a hangover from stress and flying and all that so I took my nap and then I walked over you know I asked the front desk you know where's the nearest convenience store no it's just down the way around the corner to the left so I walked out of grot bay went over to this shop and uh picked up
a little bit of water I don't remember exactly what they had and we're going to get to it because this is where I discover Fiji Water we'll get there um I I think at this shop I might have let me see I got a picture of the bag you can't really see anything in there that's fine um but I went over to the shop got a little bit of stuff I think just you know to get me through the day
like into the 16th and that was it now

let me add to this one other person that
I know is actually coming Jim EDS Jim

EDS extreme storms um he doesn't do as
much now but he certainly did a lot back then and he's got some amazing video
Amazing Stories I've known him since 2001 and he's coming over most of the
other quote unquote hurricane Chasers I guess all of them blew it some tried to
get over they were in Miami they were ready to go flights were cancelled and me and Jim I know that's not grammatically correct I don't care we were the only two that I'm aware of that made it and we were there so he comes in
um I think the night of the 15th and so

he and I trying to remember I think we took a cab excuse me we took a cab down yeah I should look at the um I
think towards Shelly Bay let me look at a map here of of bermo this will really help duh I probably should have put this
uh up first hold on what did I do here
Google Maps there we go um I want tell you exactly where we were cuz it's it's pretty cool we took a cab and uh say we

went we were up near um see the grot bay
is across from the airport and Castle

Harbor uh and St George's island is uh

across from where we are I guess and we're over on um I guess the main island
of Bermuda something like that so we are far north and east of Hamilton Hamilton is way down to our southw West I say way down it's a few miles so Jim and I take this cab not too far

away just a couple miles away down this

road here I'm going to see if I can find the area it's kind of near Bailey's Bay
um it'll be really hard to find the exact spot there's this Railway trail that goes parallel to this Main Road and I know Howard and a couple of our friends over there that are listening to this they're like yeah I know that area or whatever anyway we took the cab to
this little shopping area where they had
uh a pizza place and uh Jim and I got
some pizza and there was a little shopping center and um we got a bag of

supplies and this is where I discovered
Fiji Water uh they had like a a a stand or
whatever you call it um it's not a kiosk it's uh that front end you know it's like the front of an aisle or whatever and they were displaying it and it was only like I say only it was only like $4 for a liter you know a pretty tall bottle I was like oh awesome and I'd heard of Fiji Water I'd never drunk it cuz it's expensive I guess and I just
thought that's a good idea I'll get some Fiji Water sort of high-end bottled water what the heck Splurge a little bit
and uh so I got probably two one liter
bottles and you know the hotel's got water and whatever at the groud bay I'm not going to be um you know stranded but I got my
own water I got some snacks you know whatever they had there um I remember I got some cadburry chocolate and whatever chips they might have had you know unhealthy stuff I'm sure uh totally
different now totally different 10 years later but anyway still have the Fiji Water though but um I took a picture of this bag and it's just funny so I'm going to make this picture picture number five um yeah gpic five it's just my bag

of groceries although you can't see anything in the bag it's just this bag and it's clearly got groceries in it cuz you know it's standing upright and whatever so I got that I call it my hurricane preparedness bag that's 9:00 at night Jim had flown in he got there
just in time a little later in the day
and uh I'm tweeting about him and uh
Cantor Jim tor's excited about all this
and uh he's very um pumped up about Jim

EDS and me covering Gonzalo and Jim's

pretty you know Jim will get out there he doesn't need a a remote GoPro I guess that's his thing he's the GoPro he's going to film that thing Point Blank and
I'm like no I'm good I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do and and set stuff up remotely and uh I got this guy
that I can work with that that uh I need to get in touch with on the 16th and so forth so anyway Jim and I had a great evening hanging out bought some supplies and that and in fact it's funny I actually mentioned this in a tweet I was just reading it here um replying to Jim Kantor about Jim EDS because Jim
let's see what Jim said something about be careful uh he says uh be safe boys
right I knew he said that and I said we shall Jim is exceptional he will get some great po V shots and of course Jim would cuz that is his thing he's very known for that so
I turn in for the night and I've got a
plan for the 16th that would be
absolutely

remarkable

okay back with you now stories from the hurricane Highway discussing Hurricane Gonzalo which is now closing in on Bermuda and uh one of the last things I did before I went to bed a much needed deep sleep on the night of the 15th into the 16th is uh I set up the weather station
just to test it at my hotel room at The Grotto Bay and
um it's really cool this will be picture number what are we up to six um it's a
screenshot from the app that we used to
have hurricane impact and I had set it

up it was uh 10:20 p.m. Bermuda time and

uh everything was working fine I just needed to test it make sure it's working it's interesting because you can see that my phone had and and if when yo
look at these pictures and hopefully yo guys do CU it is really neat to see how they augment everything and just kind of glue everything together you notice on the screenshot from my phone my iPhone um it's on cell one and any bermo

people over there now is is that still there is that still the carrier anyway it says cell one and then I've obviously have uh I have a Wi-Fi signal that's about 2/3 strong you know it's got that little
thing that the Wi-Fi strength had a good solid signal about 2/3 of the way to being full so I was on the Wi-Fi at the
gr Bay and I also had a cell signal on
the island um texting by the way and phone calls very expensive we'll talk about that when we wrap this episode up Carrie was like man you did a lot of talking we'll get there so I tested the weather station and then I went to bed thank goodness get up the next day and hope holy cow this will be the next picture here uh what are we up to picture number six a beautiful picture

uh seven sorry picture number seven of the sunrise coming up there looking across uh the Harbor Castle Harbor whatever it is you can see the causeway on the right the airport is in the distance in the background that beautiful pinkish sky and I said this is
the last perfect sun sunrise for a while
here in Bermuda as monstrous category 4 Gonzalo still Bears down so it's still a cat 4 at this point so I get up let's
see what time this is 7:00 in the morning probably had some Weather Channel hits to do that would make sense
and uh I'm like all right going out later this morning to look for the ideal location to place the weather station for gonzalo's arrival wind data will be

exceptional all right then let's see so
the guy uh that was helping me uh with

his friend this dude's name was Troy and
he and I had emailed back and forth he's tweeting at me on Twitter and very helpful guy got me in touch with his friend and it's just like I remember like the Jamie that's the guy's name I had to get the guy in my head to wake up what's the file name of the guy it's Jamie so Troy is linking me up with Jamie and I'm like all right one of the things that I need to know and I even was talking to Troy about this on Twitter in front of everybody right I need to know where there's a hardware store because the one thing that I needed that I couldn't bring with me for obvious reasons was a steel Mast a pole

a 1 in in diameter preferably eh 5 foot tall steel

pole and I also need to get some zip ties and maybe another roll of gorilla tape my idea was to find an open
location with something very solid that's vertical that I could splint basically the Mast to using zip ties and

Gorilla tape and just layer that sucker towards the bottom put most of the pipe splinted against and you can picture that I hope splinted against whatever
else that's you know that I'm I'm fastening it to and then it would be as solid as a rock it was that was the plan

uh as if you know and I've said this before it's like sometimes I feel like I'm in The Truman Show that I am Truman Burbank and there's a script and somebody's directing everything because stuff just fell into my lap and how often that has happened throughout out my career is remarkable it really is this guy Troy puts me in touch with Jamie and he's not only going to help me
Jamie says I'll come pick you up uh he
calls me we talk I'll come pick you up I got a house we can set it up here it's over near Shelly Bay it's up on a hill think you'll love it like all right sounds good to me so I'm waiting for Jamie to come get me and the hotel
management had uh I was walking through
the lobby and they did really well with this telling people okay there's going to be a meeting with all of the guests and everybody it's it's basically mandatory there's a big hurricane coming a lot of tourists here let's meet let's talk so I went to the meeting sat in on it and boy I mean I got to I got to hand it to them they did really well with facts
they did really well with explaining what's going to happen how things are going to roll what to expect good morning Mark suth hurricanetrack.com here in Bermuda at the grot Bay Beach Resort folks are getting ready for this hurricane we just had a meeting with the management and the guest of the hotel going over safety precautions things to do things not to do one of the biggest tips that they kept talking about don't drink too much alcohol and then go out and do something stupid uh obviously that is a big concern people come here to vacation and to relax and let loose a little bit yo can't do that during a hurricane unfortunately you got to be on your game and make smart decisions behind me is the hotel and they're really concerned about people opening the doors and the windows wanting to make sure that they stay safe uh the management here has a lot of experience I was impressed with how they address the concerns of the guests as we get ready for Hurricane Gonzalo here in Bermuda but it's really
interesting and I'll put this as picture number eight the one thing G pick 8 here

the one thing that they said above all else I just thought this was really funny even tweeted about it the biggest concern that management had for the guests was to not be drunk during the hurricane because this was not going to be Fay this was going to be potentially the
worst hurricane they've had in a long time it was a four ladies and gentlemen a category four headed right for Bermuda and it's less than a day away and people
come out there they like to drink the dark and stormy whatever you know and
have a good time relax you're in Bermuda they didn't want people drinking too much you got to have your wits about yo don't be wandering off in the eye something bad could happen and there was a few Chuckles of course but it was very serious and I was very very impressed with how they handled everything so I left the meeting and

it's not you know not even noon yet and
already all kinds of stuff's getting done hits with the Weather Channel this emergency management meeting with the hotel and then Jamie comes to pick me up around 10:30ish and I tweeted heading out with a local fella who going to help with setting up the weather station such incredibly nice people here and he was he was just terrific um we took off and

I immediately even after the cab ride the other night with Jim was because that was at night this is during the day really had to get used to me sitting on
the left side as the passenger and he's
on the right side of his car he had like a Mitsubishi or something I don't know it's like a a boxy looking SUV like a work SUV and then driving on the left side of the road it was just all weird so off we go
weaving around great driver when I say weaving around I don't mean like it's an indictment against Jamie they're narrow roads there they are and uh there's there's people on mopeds and oh man it was like Wow and I just took it all in the air was just as thick with humidity and heat as you could imagine the clouds are coming in some of that high cirrus starting to get a little bit more of the layering a little bit more cumulous slightly like almost like banding coming in yeah you could tell there's a hurricane coming no doubt about it so we
get over to his house near the Shelly Bay Area and oh my goodness I mean this

guy had an amazing house I think it's like 5,000 square ft had a beautiful
pool um had a boat sitting in the yard
and a guest house tremendous I met his
wife and their two kids as hospitable as
you could possibly want just terrific
and he said we could set it up on my chimney now why you have a chimney in Bermudas Beyond me but whatever and I
was like really he goes yeah and it turns out as I got to know him he as I
mentioned has a solar panel company
again I think it's called Bermuda solar and he is pretty versed in construction
and so he's like I'll handle it we can I've got a mast you know what do yo need I I when I when I told him what we needed he said I got it we can put it up here we can run your wires into the roof
he said I'm going to drill into my roof and we'll put the Box up in the attic or whatever I was blown away because now
the weather station the anemometer is going to be sighted that's what you call it when you put one of these things out you have to site them properly yo
couldn't beat this uh I mean we're talking up on a hill so we're elev ated and yeah we'd have to figure out exactly how high we were I think it was like 300 ft or something um or maybe less than
that honestly maybe 80 ft but
nonetheless the top of the house added another 20 or 30 ft and then you know the chimney and whatnot we're probably 100 ft in the air fully exposed the
anemometer would be exposed all around
all 360 deges on the compass no problem

and this guy it took a little while we had to get some stuff you know whatever and we had to drill through his roof I had to work inside the attic he came up there too get the computer going run the wires through had to seal stuff back off and here's something else I learned about I
discovered Fiji Water and then another remarkable just serendipitous thing
Carrie and I uh for the years that we had been working together anything we' had ever made that we had to seal something with we used used 3M silicone and this guy introduced me to

3M 5200 adhesive sealant he swore by it

cuz I was like hey you got some silicone I don't use silicone we use 5200 oh yeah what's that it's this it looks like toothpaste basically it's white they have different colors we had white it takes a little while to set yes but yo

know at least it works works and this
stuff like if you had a tube of this and
30 pieces of bamboo and you're stuck on an island and something to lash the bamboo together you could use this tube of 5200 to seal everything and you can build yourself a raft you're good to go people use it for Yachts boats anything it is incredible again the full curing
of it that's what they call when it dries takes a week but at least once yo
lay it down it's it's instantly going to seal any holes that he drilled cuz he did he had to drill some holes through that roof that they've got these very interesting white um I don't know what
you call them let me let me look it up real quick this will be interesting we'll learn together I remember but I forgot this is one of those things where I will remember later uh what are

Bermuda roofs made
of Bermuda roofs are made of limestone
which is white in color in the past lime mortar was used however these days roofs are painted with a lime based white wash so he did he drilled
through that and just a little hole cuz
we had to run the wire from the anemometer down into the attic and then
into the Pelican case that I had brought
again about the size of a brief briefcase but double the thickness it's the best way to describe it and uh that had the little Acer laptop and
uh the battery and the um you know the

inverter all the stuff right uh to record everything and to log it and to use his Network he had Wi-Fi to send the
stuff out because I didn't have cellular data there like a an air card or anything like that none of that was going to work none of the Verizon hotspots were going to work in Bermuda don't remember why maybe they do now I don't know no they didn't back then so I needed Wi-Fi I had

it at grot Bay for my computer for my
Skype stuff for the Weather Channel whatever and um uh I could text over

bermuda's Network that sell one thing but that was costly it was like a quarter per text or something I don't remember but it was not free um and then I would use Jaime's Wi-Fi at his house and so we set
everything up it took a couple of hours and we got it done towards the

evening and it was just amazing we got
it all set up so by the early evening
Gonzalo was closing in this will be the next picture this is the view I know it doesn't look like much cuz it's at night but 7:04 p.m. everything's running 17.2

m per hour wind gusting to 23 pressure
down to 1,6 mbar I I was
absolutely in heaven you know like from
a project perspective this was gold there it is

live weather data from a state-of-the-art anemometer perfectly sighted construction grade this guy put these clamp things where he drilled into his chimney that anemometer was not going anywhere it would have to blow the chimney off the anemometer would still be on it live from Shelly Bay Bermuda

and just to say it again now to yo folks it was a Monumental moment I was so proud then it even gets better

remember I told you I brought one of the Logitech remote cams we set that sucker
up on his Wi-Fi and he back then they

were kind of heavy even the when we got him reduced cuz he has that freaking uh golf cart battery and there still ways I don't know know 6 7even 8 lbs um and the
case again is about double the thickness of a briefcase whatever uh so he put on
one of his columns that goes around his pool um he drilled a bracket into that

so that the camera could rest on it and then we put bungee cords around it to hold it in place I mean this guy was going all out I was so grateful so we
had live video shooting AC cross his pool at his house you can see the palms and everything it was amazing and I was like all right that's it I I I am going
to own this hurricane it is going to be

incredible so I get back to the
hotel and uh I find Jim EDS let's see

what time this was I even said that I get back I go now it's time to plan for tomorrow again this is October 16th we
will uh be staying in and around the hotel GR Bay Resort we'll check in on Extreme storms which is Jim EDS often as
well yeah that was 9:41 p.m. um and I was uh all set to go

so I talked with Jim I remember down in

the lobby very nice Lobby they had a bar off to the right or depending on when how how you look at it if you come in the front entrance the bar was over to the right and you had this nice lobby area you could walk out into this huge lawn and then go down to the bay or or Castle Bay whatever it is Harbor uh just a beautiful Resort just incredible um
and so he and I kind of strategize what are we going to do I was like well I am going to do a lot of stuff with the Weather Channel so I'm going to hang around the the property I said I would like to get a GoPro I showed him the Gorilla tape and my little setup where it's on this little monopod thing I said I'd like to get a GoPro um it's going to run about 4 hours
out on the causeway when the worst of it coming cuz that's where the people died um during
uh what was it Fabian it it's got history and it would be incredible like a point of view shot in your face cuz you know darn category 4 probably going to weaken to a three still it's going to pack a heck of a punch I'd love to get one out on the causeway he's like yeah I think I'm going to shoot out there I'm going to get my POV shots that's again what Jim was famous for um and he would do a few hits too with the Weather Channel as he as often as he could but he's going to be out in it so we kind of had a plan and I turned in for the night

and uh you know tweeted a couple of things and um looked over more stuff

right and I went to bed and um it's
already after midnight I'm still up 12:31 in the morning Bermuda time and I'm tweeting at people um our app was
actually doing pretty well I will will say uh on IOS and Android we had both
that year and uh there's a person here on Twitter Wesley wolf um I don't think

they're on Twitter anymore CU it's all grayed out now and this again goes back to archives so whatever but um Wesley

says to me hurricane impact is awesome love the live data feed and you know folks that's what was so important to me is look I'm I'm there covering it sure it's an exciting moment um chasing a hurricane outside of the country whatever you want to say but to have this live data really really just
meant so much to me and that somebody reached out Troy got me in touch with somebody else Jamie I've never met these people they trusted me they took me in they embraced what we were doing we as the whole project again I'm in charge of it it's my project I am the owner but it
is such a community effort and you know
that all these years later of course it is but this really was the first moment

that that really started becoming a parent you know we're in the age of social media now it's really blossomed in 2014 and this is a great example of
that so I went to bed with just a sense

of accomplishment I remember and it was
very costly to do so calling my mom and dad and telling them just amazing stories already how wonderful everybody was and
it was just incredible but remember
while all that positivity is happening there is still a very powerful hurricane coming and it's going to make landfall in Bermuda the next [Music]

day

okay so we're up to October 17th now and

Gonzalo at the 5:00 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time advisory still the category 4 Winds were
130 mph the pressure still at 946

milars and the headline from the National Hurricane Center was conditions on bermudo will deteriorate this morning Gonzalo likely to bring damaging winds and a life-threatening storm surge later today I was up early did a hit with the
Weather Channel fairly early and checked
the weather station over there in Shelly Bay again how cool was that that was so
awesome and you can see the low clouds starting to stream in um this will be a picture that I'll post as well I think we're up to like number nine this will be G pick nine yep actually we're up to number 10
there we go see I got him in a directory so it tells me when hey you want to replace number nine no I don't let's keep it cuz this is number 10 anyway hopefully you'll look at it you'll see um this really neat shot the sun's starting to come up and uh this was at 6:06 in the morning uh local time and

there's those low clouds you got to imagine the humidity is really high the wind is picking up already 23 mph that's the 1 minute sustained average right and then the
gust for that minute the minute of 606
or so a.m. was 30 and then the pressure
was down to 1,000 mbars and because the
weather station was up on this hill and then furthermore up in Jim's attic where the actual pressure sensor was um the
pressure was reading lower because its station pressure and it's not adjusted
to sea level yet we would do that later
um once we got the data back but the wind is definitely starting to pick up so uh I start my day that way and uh we
move forward uh about an hour and the
pressure still around 1,000 millibars the picture though is really neat I'll save this one as picture number 11 what a really cool picture there from uh Jim's house there in Shelly Bay uh looking across you can see the palms and the water in the distance other little hillsides his boat and those famous
white roofs of Bermuda structures so I

hang out at the grot bay and gonzalo's

coming and I tweeted I haven't really had time to count how many tweets I did
but it's it could be close to 50 maybe

more just on the 17th so so it's almost
like live tweeting I was definitely reporting a lot on Twitter and fully

taking advantage of its multimedia capability with pictures it doesn't look
like I ever posted any video on Twitter
which is a bummer um I don't know why
maybe it was not a thing back then video
would come later I don't know there's got to be a reason why there's no um video from me on Twitter but they

closed the causeway and this is going to be another picture that I'll post for you here beautiful shot from my balcony

at my room there at grot Bay Resort and my tweet was no rain yet Causeway closed
and that was at 10:03 in the morning local time I think we're up to picture number 13 and uh Gonzalo is getting

closer let's see what the 11:00 uh time uh eastern Time or Atlantic Standard Time which is the same as Eastern says about Gonzalo uh the eye of Hurricane Gonzalo and bermo radar so by 11:00 a.m. they can see the eye and the winds were down to 125 so it's a category three but the
pressure pretty much holding steady roughly it's up 1 milar to
947 that's just a rounding error right
so still a formidable hurricane headed
for Bermuda so I go about the day doing
report for The Weather Channel
and you know tweeting obviously like mad
um the weather station is doing great 11:05 in the morning uh on the weather station over at Shelly Bay we're now gusting to Tropical Storm Force so the
gust for 11:06 uh a.m. was 36.6
milph and the wind speed sustained was up to 27 the pressure down 2 mbar to
998 and and um things just continue to
crank the clouds get thicker those banded looks to the clouds come in um

the clouds and I even mentioned this here on Twitter let's see what time I posted that uh again lots and lots of tweets this is 11:57 a.m. not much
change wind kicking up more and clouds lowering with a lot more humidity and you could feel when you have a hurricane coming no matter where you are you can feel it come in that warm core um um
there's just nothing like it especially once the eye gets there the air is just so warm and full of moisture and energy it's just incredible how that works so
as time goes on now a little bit afternoon um the anomet showing 26 mph
sustained 42 is the gust and the
pressure down to 995 now the uh next thing that I'm going to do
uh this is 125
um in the afternoon that I posted this on Twitter uh I said okay about to Tech
about to let technology get closer than I can going to place a GoPro with a 5H
hour battery so I guess it was 5 hours 64 gigabyte chip isn't that funny 64
gigs back then was like yeah now some of
our GoPros we're putting one terabyte in there and it's we're recording in 4k

wow anyway this why this podcast is so
neat because we can look back and go look at where we've come from and now we know where we are today that's pretty cool so yeah I'm getting ready to put this out I tweeted about it I'm going to put it on a dock facing the causeway so
they had this little dive dock down there you can rent um scuba stuff and uh

snorkel and whatnot and they had ladders off the side of this dock and you know
you could go out into the castle Harbor or whatever it's called right out there in front of gr Bay between gr Bay Resort
and the airport and the pilings that come up
around the dock that supported it I
guess you could call it like the superstructure one of them on the corner
seemed like a really good spot to put
the camera the GoPro and a few people
were asking me on Twitter will this be live and I was like nope not going to be live with it but um it is going to be amazing especially the time lapse that I could do really excited about it I was
getting that thing ready making sure that the chip was blank the batteries were fully charged the little backpack thing whatever ready to go and then uh
looks like here at um I went down to the beach front and took some pictures and and whatnot this was at 2:57 p.m. and I

said I swear I heard a C130 dirty fly over when I was down at the beach front a few minutes ago seriously unmistakable
sound and if you've ever heard those big powerful engines on a C130 I think the
hurricane hunter flew over Bermuda and uh while they were doing their stuff and I heard it and uh that was pretty neat obviously BDA the airport is closed so
moving on along 50 m pror wind now
getting picked up on the anemometer over at Shelly Bay I'm going to save this picture you can even see if you look closely the um the app and the
overall uh backend UI user interface
everything whatever you want to call it that we developed in cooperation with our app developer and then my really good friend from way back in my childhood Jason um I think it was a pretty cool little setup you had a webcam picture that was coming from this bullet cam the same bullet cams that we were using from day one like like in 2005 they were
still in use to send a picture every
minute to the website to our server and
then that would feed into the app the app would scrape the server look for the data and populate the app with the information a webcam picture at the top and if you look at the picture you'll see and you might remember this on Hurricane impact the app uh previously
called hurricane track and uh so at 3:05 p.m. the sustained wind at 31 A2 and again that is the average one minute wind speed you know and the computer is doing all that and then it it sends that
and by the way that computer is this little Acer sitting in a little box and

I think I'm going to you know add some pictures later that I want you to make sure you look for that I'm not seeing right now cuz I'm they're not on my Twitter but they're pictures that I took that are saved on one of my portable hard drives from this event and and I will make those as little attachments on patreon as well all right so be sure to see those cuz I'm pretty sure I took a picture of the setup in Jam's attic I
think he's in the picture too it's pretty wild so there will be a lot more pictures but anyway this one what are we up to like number 15 let me take care of that first uh Gonzalo pick and we are up

to um 14 all right very good so this one

shows the webcam picture at the top yo can see the white caps on Shelly Bay and
the wind again 31 1/2 it's a 1 minute average computer like I was trying to say before I interrupted myself so much to tell you um the one minute average 31

A2 and then the peak gust the highest gust during that minute 50.2 M hour
pressure now down to 988 it was probably 990 991 depending on

I can't remember how much the pressure
drops You' think I would know this but I don't like per 10 m or something there's
a formula I don't know what it is that's fine um I only know when I need to know like when we're trying to run calculations I haven't memorized it but the pressure is a little bit lower than it would be because again we're up on a hill however that being said you can
clearly see we are not that far above sea level because that's where Shelly Bay is in the distance there with white caps on it all right so that was from 305 and then go down sort of close to

the Waterfront this is going to be picture number 15 what a great picture

you can clearly see this little dock
thing that goes out into the water and

the um the harbor there is starting to
spill over it there's so couple foot waves whatever you know the Harbor's protected so you're not going to get anything extraordinary at least not yet uh but the pier the dock is getting overtaken by some splashing waves and so forth and I even went down there and
shot video on that dock you know because
the other iPhone that I had with me that Carrie had provided um we had it in a Lifeproof case remember that company I think they're still around um LifeProof and um so it was waterproof
you know and I could shoot whatever and no problem at all so I did I went down there and I took some video of this dock

getting overrun by water splashing waves and whatnot um it was pretty cool it's in one of the documentaries I guess it would be tracking the Hurricanes
2016 if you haven't seen that I did a
little recap it was like part one and part two part one of tracking the Hurricanes 2016 catches is catches I
can't talk catches us up there you go
mark from 08 like the end of' 08 so
basically 09 through 2015 in documentary

form and I go through all the stuff we
had done since 2008 how the project had evolved and that's part one part two is
2016 by itself which of course culminates with the big climax of Hurricane Matthew um but in that part
one if you haven't seen it it's worth your your your time I think you'll see I
did a little piece in there about Gonzalo cuz I'm going through the timeline okay what have we been doing since the last time I made one of these which was 2008 so I had like an eight-year Gap where I didn't make these documentaries I don't know why a lot of it was just trying to find myself again you know with my finances and the loss of Lowe's and the family trying to deal with all that is turmoil and the country was in turmoil and just you know my creative juices were and also we didn't
have much hurricane activity to speak of
I mean I guess I could have made a documentary just about Sandy but I digress it's on there 2016 part one
tracking the hurricanes and you can see I actually go down to the water I would play the audio but it's just splashing water and wind it would blow your ear drums out so anyway the picture uh I literally said water is pouring into Castle Bay at the dock in front of grot Bay Resort almost submerged now and that is where I was going to put the GoPro on one of the pilings that supports that

[Music]
dock okay so we are up to the
midafternoon now on October 17th
2014 Gonzalo is still just a few hours
away before making landfall officially
in Bermuda and it's time for me to put that GoPro down on this little dive dock

uh right down at the harbor so yeah it's not too bad out there in between bands I make my way down I've got the GoPro on
the little selfie stick and um the

gorilla tape with me and it's raining of
course pelting my face uh I took my iPhone SE with me that's in the Life prooof case that I've got with it so I can film even in the rain you can even take that thing underwater and I go out

there and find the piling that I thought
would work and it's like this white
piling I think it had like a black rim
on the top of it some kind of a ring or something um it has like a white plastic coating on it I guess to keep sea life and everything else from just eroding the concrete or whatever it's made out of but um it was a good surface that
would grip the Gorilla tape and again being between the bands of rain really
heavy rain I was able to more or less
dry off just enough of the piling to get

the Gorilla Tape to adhere you know cuz that could be a big problem I remember even took a towel with me so I set the
GoPro vertical along this little selfie stick thing and started wrapping the

Gorilla tape around it layer after layer after layer and you know the full length

covering that selfie stick and it was

incredible like I I really put some effort into it and I got that thing Rock Solid tore the Gorilla Tape hit used the
Gorilla Tape roll itself like as a hammer to kind of beat down on all the
different layers to really compact everything and then I aimed the GoPro
you know cuz you can tilt it up and down on this little swivel thing that's on there where it attaches to the selfie stick I got it where I thought it was level and it was looking out across the
harbor towards the causeway and I tightened that little screw down there's if you know a GoPro we've got this little screw thing it's proprietary to them and other people have ripped it off over the years but whatever um but I tightened it down as
best I could and hit record and off it

went and I was like okay please work yo
know like this could be amazing we still have a few hours to go until landfall and I really really hope this works so then I went back up to my room
and dried off probably changed clothes
and things just went like crazy on after

that um the winds started really gusting
even more as you'd expect me none of this is a surprise 64 mph over there at

the weather station at Shelly Bay I'm noticing here on one of my tweets I posted a screenshot from our app and the
pressure was down to 983 um it just really starts rocking out
there finally the uh internet goes out

over at Jim's house as you'd expect yo know with this hurricane rolling in and uh so his router is not going to work he's got no power there um and I was tweeting about that I noticed that the weather station stopped updating the app
and it also goes to our website which it still does even today we don't have the app anymore but all the weather data goes to these different what we call Tower pages uh on the hurricane track
Insider site and uh so I was watching it
there and watching it in the app just to make sure you one or the other wasn't malfunctioning and it it indeed reflected the fact that well jimie must have lost power and the internet's out I remember texting him he confirmed it and it was a bummer not to be able to see it in real time on the app or on the website but I knew that the laptop

inside the Pelican case the little Acer
laptop was recording all of this data so
I wasn't too worried about it like okay at least we got the data being recorded onto the hard drive when this is all over I'll go back and get it and we should have some incredible uh amounts
of data and I remember even tweeting
that the anomet is likely
recording some of the highest wind speeds that it has ever recorded yo because the eyewall is just about to move in it's imminent and things really
go crazy you can't even see the dock in front of The Grotto Bay anymore and I figured man that camera it must be
seeing some incredible sights and hearing some incredible sounds right there point blank in the
storm surge because that's what it is you know even that little Harbor um
Castle Harbor you know there is a storm surge you blow wind across anybody have water and on the opposite end the landward side you're going to get storm surge you know even if it's just a few inches it's still Surge and the wind outside is so loud and so surrounding it's like a train like they say or a big
IMAX movie soundtrack you think like the movie Interstellar or something like that in IMAX you know where it's just thundering uh sound it's all encompassing you can feel it in your body the whole place was just really rocking you know the sound of a category 3 hurricane moving in Gonzalo had
weakened from a four to a three at this point so it's coming and the eyewall lasted about 30 minutes and finally we
get into the eye and it gets dark as

this is happening it's like a come on um

and uh so at 5:00 uh Atlantic Standard Time same as eastern time uh it was very near Bermuda and as
I said the winds were down to 115 just looking at the Hurricane Center advisory here and the pressure was still at 949
mbars which is you know that's that's a pretty low pressure for such a low wind speed but Gonzalo was undergoing sheer
and um you know getting pushed from the southwest and so the core was starting to be disrupted so it was harder and harder for those winds to mix down to the surface and um so sure enough I took
a picture of the satellite animation

here of Gonzalo this was at 6:47 p.m. we are in the eye it's it's coming over starting to calm down and so less than a week apart you have Fay that was a
hurricane and now Gonzalo and I'm almost in the eye it's
got that edge of the eyewall Raging blasting stabs of wind uh my ears are
popping you get these quick pressure changes when these huge bursts of wind
hit and the pressure goes up and down very rapidly um because it rolls over
the building it's just amazing how this stuff does and thank goodness the uh the
buildings in Bermuda are uh built as
strong as they are because I didn't have to really worry too much even though it was unnerving I felt pretty safe overall
even though all there's there's this banging around and you know it's quite chaotic if you've never been in a hurricane let me tell you especially a major one it is unnerving I don't care how many times you've done it so the eye

comes over and I want to try to get outside live using the iPhone SE and the cellular

network I gave that a try and I think it
worked okay um hard to remember exactly

what I did and when I know I recorded video and I posted it to my Instagram and again I got to say I guess Twitter just didn't do video in 2014 cuz I don't see any video on here
at all but whatever I also met up with Jim EDS during the ey we did a selfie together and then the other thing that I
wanted to do in the eye was to go down
and get the GoPro off the dock I figured

it was calm enough let me go try so I took my flashlight I went down there and
it was incredible to see that thing the the dock was busted up a little bit um but I could get out there there were a couple of other people Milling around out there as well luckily they didn't see it because it was on the you know the water side of the piling you'd have to be looking for it and um they were
like what is that I was like that's my GoPro and they're like oh dude that's Epic and uh it it was off because it had
run out of battery power it had gone the full 4 and 1/2 hours or so and I was
thinking all right hopefully it's off because it it worked you know like it didn't turn off prematurely and I wouldn't know until I got back up and plugged everything into my Sony VIO the laptop to see what I got um but what's
really cool in the eye and I do have audio for this for you the sound of the

frogs these people ERS that are just
incredible they come out at night regardless whether whether or not there's a hurricane they're every night I'm assuming all the time in Bermuda a very distinct sound and I did a a little
walk and talk during the eye and here's a little bit of that audio for you this is the eye of Hurricane
Gonzalo just a little bit of
mist falling light rain I mean look at
the bags on the lamp posts just as still as they could be

it's like walking around in a light

drizzle just
incredible I wish it was Daylight but oh well so I did an interview with the Weather Channel in the eye as well and
that was amazing I was talking with Michael Lowry uh of The Weather Channel back in the day and it was just this amazing
experience there I am I'm in the eye it's rare to have the eye of a hurricane go over Bermuda very difficult to do Bermuda a pretty small Target in the Atlantic as you could imagine hurricanes Brush by often but to have a direct hit
with the eye especially several days after another hurricane made landfall there Fay it was amazing there's just
unbelievable odds like in my favor to to
study something like this to observe it get this wind data you name it the GoPro
hopefully worked you know like wow so
the backside comes over and it just it's

like even worse for some reason and it's really weird how that'll happen sometimes I think because the way that
the wind comes you know in different directions obviously it's coming from the opposite direction this time I'm pretty much right at my front door the entryway to the building as opposed to the front side which was coming across Castle Harbor uh across groto Bay from the water this was coming from a different direction I don't know for whatever reason it was just more pronounced for sure and just all kinds of weird things
happened um the water in the toilet was

literally kind of sucked out and yo could see it it would go out come back in as different burst of wind would hit

the building and create I guess suction
you know um I don't know is a very

strange scene you know in my room stuff's banging around the door is just rattling just like wow let's let's get this thing out of here I am I'm good yo know I'm good uh I want this to get on
Go On by Gonzalo I need to to get some sleep so uh I even tweeted here let's see what time this was 9:13 p.m. and it's still
rocking and rolling I said I dare say that the data from my weather station considering its density in other words the data density it's every minute could be historic I hope the laptop hope
laptop did not Foo
bar I should frame that tweet on my wall
we'll get to it but that's a very like oh man you shouldn't have said that hope the laptop did not Foo bar and yo guys are probably going oh no yep you'll
see um let's see so I'm talking about

how just reading my Twitter here um the

data quit streaming earlier but I'm confident it recorded on our system yo I'm just kind of talking to people I guess um so then what time is it here

it's still about 9:15 so I'm working working in the the grot bay cuz they still have power and they still have um
internet so I'm able to do at least Skype audio there's not enough bandwidth to do video so I put the 64 gbyte uh

chip into my voo to see what the GoPro
caught and it was really really amazing
just to see the view from the water

hours before landfall the comes to life it goes from

you know a little bit of wind waves and the winds just blowing across the top couple of burst here and there to yo
know when you get really close to landfall and before the GoPro finally went out it was right before dark right before landfall it quit but it was right
before dark you know or as it was getting dark honestly so I didn't really miss anything uh in fact as as I recall
it did get dark and then the eyewall came over over and so all you were going to hear is sound so it worked like all
the way as expected once it got dark you're not seeing anything but I'm telling you right before it got dark those waves you know from that Point Blank Range it looked like you were out in the middle of the Atlantic it was incredible so I worked for a good while

to edit together uh some like a
composite or a montage whatever and uh

time lapse if I could that takes a while to process all that GoPro stuff and you know figure out how to get

it I guess back then on my FTP site um
we didn't have Dropbox or if we did I wasn't aware of it in 2014 but I did I worked on the video uh
to the best of my ability although these
were would have been pretty big files because it was in high definition probably 720p which is
HD and uh I wasn't going to be able to
upload that much data so I guess I was just going to wait until I got back to the states to be able to share it I think that's what I was thinking about back then or you know the plan of procedure um so I just kind of hung on

and uh finally stuff started to calm
down I get some sleep and I get up the

next day and I took a picture let's see what we're up to here here cuz this is a beautiful picture the next day we are up
to picture number 18 all right so Gonzalo pick number 18

and just a reminder 17 is the landfall
satellite picture picture number 16 is the shot screenshot from the iPad

of 64 mph wind gust and so forth so

we're up to number 18 here of uh the
sunrise from Bay Resort on the 18th of

October and it's all calm out there for the most part I look across towards the
airport trying to see if there's anything happening so I would like to be able to leave on the 19th that would have been nice be able to get back home and uh see what's happening with the the
uh the weather data get that and process a bunch of stuff you know I had work to do so
um let's see reading through my tweets
8:21 a.m. um I said I heard from the
gentleman near Shelly Bay where my weather station is says it
survived my plan was and I said it here going to hike over in a little bit I'll post picks along the way so I'd slept pretty well you know probably six or seven hours after Gonzalo passed now
we're up to the 18th and I'm going to walk from The Grotto Bay Resort down to

Jim's Place and go get the weather
station and it's not that far but it was
a pretty good hike and it's humid um
kind of gnarly out there you know like
so I took a bottle of water with me my Fiji Water and um my iPhone fully

charged and off I go and I took a few
pictures along the way as you can imagine there's lots of vegetated debris
I'm on Northshore Drive making my way
down towards um Shelly Bay so as I move along

not too far from grot Bay is a little
place called The Swizzle Inn it's been there a long time and the current owner
this guy named Jay Korea is Milling
around outside I talked to him him I'm pretty good at just chatting with people and I did a little interview with him so to speak a little quickie a little short interview and I'm telling you ever since
then he and I have been friends and I have not met him since uh We've communicated a lot of times I was in Berita in 2022 um for uh my anniversary with my

wife went on a cruise and he happened to not be there but his son was anyway Jay and I have been friends ever since and here's the that quick interaction the day after Hurricane Gonzalo and I think you'll laugh at what one of his biggest concerns
was so you're the owner here yes sir tell me your name please uh J Korea swizzin very famous yeah it's been around for a long time the Swizzle I'm looking at the roof here this part of the roof was built in the late 1600s and
that's the first time we've ever had any damage to it the rest in the back there was more recent back in the ' 70s that held on on um but I'm grateful and thankful that's all the damage we have from what I can see and my my palm trees took a bit of a beat and your traffic lights and my traffic lights yeah little risky across the road and I lost the Satellite Dish which upsets me cuz I can't see my Chelsea game today so yeah that was a really really neat moment to talk to somebody a local
who's got a business there the swizzin um they have a really nice restaurant there um Paul Bowman was very
excited about all that cuz he had visited there a number of years before it's like a famous place it really is um
you Swizzle in and you Swagger out I think is the um the slogan that they use
the story they say about that place Jay Korea what a what a neat guy can't wait
to see him again in person sometime yeah hopefully under the right circumstances yeah also I tweeted about um that I did

do a small sample time lapse I must have been able to render out a kind of a low resolution version to show what the
GoPro caught and I tagged a bunch of people from The Weather Channel Norah uh and The Weather Channel main Twitter and Dave Clark the president at the time and um it's just funny because I tagged them and I'm like uploaded a sample time lapse from the GoPro cam to my FTP
that's file transport protocol and basically I can store stuff on my server my own Dropbox right most computer people you understand that and I said Rich should have an email about it I don't remember who Rich was must have been somebody on the back end of their tech people there anyway I move along
trying to get on my way to oh yeah there
it is by the way I tweeted about Paul uh Paul says um oh this is cool so

I took a picture of Jay and I know I did the video for you where you you hear the audio let's make this picture number 19
because there is Jay Korea himself that's so cool so Paul says uh I

could sure use a rum Swizzle about now
oh and a new Swizzle in t-shirt I'm kind
of worn out of my old one he wore it out so I said I got one for you the shirt
not the drink so Jay must have given me
a shirt I mean the guy just met me he got railroaded by a hurricane and his business is knocked out for a little bit and he's not mad he's not mad at the hurricane guy he was very nice he gave me one of the Swizzle t-shirts that's so neat and I did I held on to it and I I mailed it to Paul sure did that's a true
story uh so I keep going and I come
across this will be picture number 20 a lot of pictures with this episode ladies and gentlemen that's just the way it goes these helped to augment everything uh landfall restaurant
beautiful name right that's a classic sign of the year I said uh make my way
down to this rest uh restaurant this

intersection and there's a uh a gas station there and a little shop and there's power poles leaning the crews are trying to work to get everything up and I was like pretty um Haggard right uh it was hot
humid I had consumed much of my water
and and I went over to the grocery store you know or the the convenience store part of the gas station I'm going to click on this um I might as well just save this to as picture number 21 a lot
of pictures here that's all right uh what does it say Esso so kind of looks like Exxon but it says Esso there's a little grocery store there part of it and I remember I went in and they had power cuz the dude had a
generator and um he saw my shirt had my

hurricane track shirt on of course oh and by the way this just came to me I remember now I had my spot locator yo

know that we use in Herby I took that with me not Herby But the spot locator
and I was running that um in my pocket
and so every once in a while it would get enough of a signal cuz you typically have to face it up at the sky but Carrie wanted to be able to keep track of me we didn't have the tracking on our phone like we do now with aprs or Life 360 or
whatever um so I used my spot locator
and I had that and um my hurricane Shack
shirt and you know had my iPhone and then probably the iPhone SE and the shop owner again these folks

in Bermuda just like overwhelmed me with

kindness you know he was like hey what are you doing and I explained it and whatever and he said whatever you need
from the shop you can have it you know
obviously I'm not going to come in and fill up a cart but he's like you need some water you need some snacks go right ahead and I went and uh I got a cold uh

liter of Fiji Water I think I got some peanuts or something for some carbs and a little bit of energy um and uh and

that's pretty much all I could carry but the guy just said you know have it yo know and good luck with everything thanks for you know covering the story of Bermuda or something like that it was just amazing I I mean I was overwhelmed it almost made me want to cry I'm going be honest with you it was like just an incredible and I didn't ask I just the guy just did it and so that was really neat I sat down out on this wall a little you know small little not a retaining wall but just you know a decorative wall around some shrubs or something and I drank my cold water
and um it's like all right I still got a ways to go let's go so I get moving and
I'm working my way down towards Jaime's place at Shelly Bay and uh took a few

pictures here and there there's just so many pictures right finally I get to

Jim's uh house and uh just trying to see if I have anything in here where I talk about it da yeah so I get to Jim's house it's
funny I didn't tweet about it I'm not sure why I didn't I get there and um

they did pretty good I think he had this um sort of a what do they call it it's like a moon wall or something they have some special name they build these entryways out of the
Limestone and it's like the shape of a
crescent moon or whatever like a half moon or something I'm sure there's a story story behind it I just can't recall it and several people have these
uh in Berita right it's like a thing his
collapsed the wind blew it over and it collapsed otherwise his house is in pretty good shape just very minor damage which was generally the case for all of Bermuda by the way again I cannot emphasize enough they are built very solid you know it's a little bit of a uh a hit to the jaw but not a knockout punch by any stretch major power outages
a few injuries I'm sure but nothing too terribly bad so I'm sitting there at his house and uh we go up into the attic we
get the laptop and uh bring it down and

um I was trying to remember how we did
he have power yet cuz I know that you I
guess the laptop still had power yeah of course it did because the uh the battery
uh in the case with it it was a big 45 amp hour battery battery and that's going to run everything for a long time plus the laptop itself has an internal battery that'll run for several hours and it hasn't really been that long so yes the laptop still had um Power uh

battery power whatever so um I turned it

on because it was off I was like all right well it's off that's a little concerning what's up with that turned it on and fired everything up Windows came came up and I'm looking at the data file

and I was like well something's wrong
here it looks like it stops you know right as the eyewall is coming over and he's like oh really I
like hold on let me just check and I looked again and just to make sure and

that's exactly what happened the data just quit the file is logging every
minute of 1 minute average the peak gust
and the pressure and all that and everything just stops right as the eyewall was coming over the winds were like in the 90s or something like that maybe a little higher and it just quit and I was like I
really was just baffled you know cuz the laptop had a full battery I had powered
it back on like I said once we got it out of the case it was off I turned it on and it had uh full battery

no problem and I started thinking about it I was like you know I don't think I really turned it on per se you know like
from scratch where you have to log in because there's a password you know most people put a password on their Windows machines or anything I I was like huh you know I
think it kind of like came out of hibernation I was trying to figure all this out it's like yeah it it wasn't off
it was hibernating but I thought I had turned all the of that stuff off like and let me let me address that I knew with these laptops that you don't want
them to go to sleep because that just makes everything rest everything all the processes will stop there is the thing that you can do to keep the screen from turning off you know and then apparently

as I learned the hard way there is an even deeper setting that prevents the laptop from
hibernating or going to sleep or whatever so there's the thing where yo know if you're working on your PC and you step away for a few minutes whatever the default is your screen will turn off
but your computer is still running so if you move your mouse or whatever it it it just pops right back up it wakes up but that's not the same as whatever the
setting is where it hibernates where everything stops processing I don't know what that's called doesn't really matter now but it did then and that's exactly
what happened I figured it out pretty quickly that way down in these settings
there was something I remember looking in these settings and I found it it was like let me do the math it was basically
after 12 hours uh so 60 Minutes * 12 is 720 yep

it had a setting I could have done that in my head I know that it 720 minutes

the laptop will hibernate not the same as you know go to

sleep or whatever where the screen just turns off I had disabled that so here's

another way to look at I want to make sure you fully understand this and if I'm OV explaining it I'm sorry if let's
say that the moment Jamie and I had everything set up in his attic the laptop in the case and and you could be tiny in the case case you know be a little tiny little gnome or something to sit in the case or you had a camera in there whatever and you were looking at the laptop the screen would have stayed
on because I turned that off yes I know
it runs battery power to do that but the brightness was all the way down to as low as it could go whatever because I didn't want anything to happen I was like let's turn that off so I turned off the screen thing so it doesn't go to sleep but I didn't realize you have to go deeper to turn off the hibernation or
set it to 6,000 minutes or something lo
and behold I found that setting and it said it was at 720 minutes so at exactly

12 hours after we had everything set up and

running it shut off it did exactly what Windows was supposed to do and I missed
the worst of the core and the backside
and I'm telling you what it was like wow
it was right up there with losing the camera boxes and Katrina and then I found the one that we did locate and I
had the wrong camera plugged in yo hopefully remember that story you know we had the black and white Daytime Nighttime camera and the color daytime anyway it was like gosh cuz to me data the wind data

is right up there with the video data and wind data is just so difficult to
capture for so many reasons it is so
elusive video is fairly easy you know
comparatively and it really hurt it really did I felt like I mean come on all this effort and I got half the thing so we
did a a plot I got my friend Jason our colleague Jason he did a plot of everything and boy it's really dramatic you see the the wind going up and you're right there near the eyewall and it should have come down and you get that inverted barometer effect and whatever the Peaks and valleys nope it just stops

halfway through I was like oh man this
really sucks uh so it is what it is went back

after uh that and I got the file um I

took a little jump drive with me because you know guess what I really can't undo
all this stuff and and have Jamie take
it down and I thought this will be my gift to Bera and to Jamie I'm going to
leave the whole setup there maybe they'll have another hurricane in the future I mean surely they will and so I
left all the equipment there told him how to look after it and whatnot we'd stay in touch and I made my way back
walked my way back to um the grot Bay Resort and was very

tired uh probably did a little bit of You Know video editing or something got another good night sleep and uh the next
day did a couple of touristy things nothing major just kind of walking around the area it was going to take a day after that this is now the 19th um and uh people were like right
back at it this will be picture this will be the last picture I think this is really funny this is two days well a full 24 hours or so maybe 30 hours after
landfall and uh everybody's down at the beach man like nothing happened at all they I I did I walked right down to the Castle Bay or Castle Harbor Beach there right in front of Grotto Bay my uh room is up there on the left you can actually see the building of where my room was

and the water's nice and everything's just hunky dory after Galo so I get on
the plane uh on the 19th I'm able to
leave and uh I'm ready to go I head home

I did a couple of uh what a beautiful shot there I left in the evening flew back into Philadelphia with some equipment yo know I left like I said the weather station there um I think he even left
the live streaming camera from
Ustream it's hard to I can't remember for sure but maybe I left that too yo never know it was paired to his you know
Wi-Fi so might as well uh get on the
plane and I head back and uh really
interesting Kind of a Funny Side Story I get back to Wilmington and um from Philly and what I
didn't realize cuz I'm waiting at the airport in Wilmington for my uh yellow
case the big yellow case that I airlin everything over in and obviously I'm coming back with much less but I still need you know what's in the case what I did bring back and they're like no we
don't we don't have it and I was like what do you mean I was you it's got here's my number my tracking number or whatever they give you for your baggage claim and they said oh they made a
couple calls or whatever like you didn't go through customs or whatever in Philadelphia and and and then go get your box there or something like I didn't realize when I got back I have to
go through customs go get the case and then start over again I think that's what it was so a couple of days
later uh American Airlines or Delta it
was Delta sorry uh the case shows up at my house yo know it was brought to me uh delivered or whatever somebody delivered it and I like Oh yay there it is sorry about that I didn't know hey I'd never traveled out of the country before but you know all in all it was

very successful the video from the

GoPro really like gave me the idea okay

these GoPros could be really useful someday uh you know like what we just did we just needed to figure out how to get them to run longer um you know 4 hours isn't going to cut it that's nice for you know like what I did in Gonzalo but you know it was it really brought it onto the radar so to speak that maybe these GoPros have use for long-term
recording we just got to figure out how to power them longer we also have to have a bigger chip remember this is 2014 64 gabt you we got 4 hours or

whatever um and we're going to need a bigger chip and all of that would happen over time of course but that was a good first run and um who knows maybe it's
the first GoPro video you know out in a
hurricane left by itself of hurricane storm surge I haven't seen anything yo
know before and I haven't seen anything come up oh look somebody else did it nobody's keeping score but hey look it was our first time and I thought it was really neat and that is some impressive video make sure you check out the tracking the Hurricanes documentary that I've got on YouTube part one tracking
the Hurricanes 2016 part 1 uh where I
recap 09 through 15 uh because I hadn't done a documentary in a while after ' 08 so
when I started him up again in 2016 after Hurricane Matthew uh I did sort of a all right what have we done since 2008 kind of thing a recap of the last8 years years or so seven years and the video from

that GoPro is on the tracking the Hurricanes 2016 part one um episode or whatever you want to call it chapter from Gonzalo all right
so yeah that's it that's Gonzalo what an
amazing adventure made a good friend there with Jay Korea met a couple of other cool people got that Swizzle in t-shirt for Paul and I did send it to him as I mentioned and that was my first time out of the country studying a hurricane abroad um I went back just to jump ahead
a little bit in 2015 in the summer and
just did some followup see how everybody's doing stayed at Jim's house
brought a couple pie of pieces of equipment to help keep that weather station going it ran for a couple more
years and then just for whatever reason just kind of lost touch with Jamie and I hadn't spoken to him since neither NE here nor there no reason just stuff happens people get busy um maybe I could see if he's still there sometime in the future um but yeah great adventure very
glad I did it learned a lot and uh I would definitely go back for a hurricane in Bermuda because now I know several people there including a good friend of the project Howard and uh Howard if you're listening hello sir and of course our good friend Jay at the Swizzle Inn
and probably a few other fans of the project that liveed there as well I am sure all right so what do we do next here well um 2014 that for the most part wrapped up
everything from my perspective as far as I can remember and we were going to continue
on with figuring out where to go next
with all of this stuff looking ahead uh
to hopefully a several year relationship
with the weather Channel I'd have to talk about that with them uh at some point do we renew my contract for 2015 you know what's going to happen next what's going to happen in 2015 um these are all things that we'd be working on in the off seon time frame
and remember this is getting towards the last third of October that I get back
from uh Bermuda and again not much happened the Atlantic hurricane season ended up with only eight Nam storms that year six of them became hurricanes including the uh very famous Gonzalo there myself Jim EDS we got in the eye I
don't think anybody else from the stormchaser community there might have been somebody else we just don't know about uh again nobody's keeping up with this in terms of a scorecard but Jim EDS
he's a legend and well I'm who I am and
I was there so that was really cool all right so that'll wrap up 2014 unless there's something that I forgot about that I'll remember later and if so I'll start with that in the next episode of stories from the hurricane Highway when we jump into 205 moving right along all right so we'll cover that next we'll start with 2015 and see where we go from there on
the next episode of this fine and dandy podcast speaking of that thank you for listening I do appreciate it I am Mark suth your host of stories from the hurricane Highway we'll start over again real soon as we begin 2015
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