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 eyewall of Hurricane Jean right now. four came in on shore here along the southeast coast of Florida. These little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that surge.
Hello again and welcome to another edition of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. I'm your host Mark Sudith. Great to have you joining in once again to take a look back at the history of
Hurricane Irma. This is the third episode of the Irma saga and I hope yo
enjoyed the second episode there, the special episode featuring Brent and his sister Jen and our good friend CJ as
they recounted their experiences with Irma. Uh Brent and his sister in the Virgin Islands and of course CJ in Florida. Now it's my turn. I have to get
ready to go down to Florida, get all the equipment packed up in the Tahoe and
deal with Irma in Florida, maybe even
parts of the Southeast. After that, there was still a big question mark. So, let's sort of catch up as to where we are in time. Remember that Irma was a
long track hurricane. Came off the coast of Africa at the very end of August.
Looked like it was going to develop. The models were all over it. Sure enough, it did, and it became an increasing threat to the northeast Caribbean, eventually plowing through that region as a category 5, a very strong category 5 at
that. Barbuta and our friends over in St. Bart, Miro, and uh his girlfriend,
their dog, they all went through it. And then Brent and the people in the Virgin Islands, and it skirted, Irma did just north of Puerto Rico. And that gets us to where we are now. We're up to September 6th and I'm looking at the 8:00 p.m. advisory graphic and the track

map from the hurricane center. And I'll go ahead and save this as picture number one to sort of start things off. So, if you want to reference that as you listen to the episode or go back and check it out on Discord or on Patreon. This first
picture here, this first image, uh, showing Irma just north of Puerto Rico,
pretty much due north of San Juan. And
the eyewall was just perfect. A perfect
buzzsaw donut with rings of convection
around it. A formidable hurricane. I mean, absolutely terrifying. Luckily, it missed Puerto Rico with the core. That would have been devastating, especially knowing what was coming later on with Maria, which we will get to, of course, in a future episode. Um, but it's pretty

much time for me to make my decision and act on it. And at this point in time, I
was pretty much set that I will head down to Florida and probably this would
be on Thursday that I would leave Thursday the 7th. And I'd probably stay at New Simra Beach at this condo that I
had stayed at before. I was there the year before for Matthew. This uh very generous supporter of the project. A guy named Mark out of Orlando allowed me to
stay at his condo there in New Simra. and I was going to do the same. So, at least I could have a jumping off point cuz of course I'm not going to be able to leave at like 7:00 in the morning. It's usually in the afternoon. Feel like I'm especially in the old days, always leaving late and I'm always tired. Things have gotten better since then for sure for a number of reasons, which we'll get to as we progress through this podcast series as it as it evolves. But,
um, that was the plan. Okay, I'm going to go to Florida and I can at least make it to the central east coast of Florida,
basically near not far from Cape Canaveral, Daytona Beach area, New Simra Beach, and then I can adjust if uh if Irma looks like it's going to go more east and come up the coast without
hitting Florida, well, I can just turn around and go up to some place like Brunswick, Georgia or Savannah, god forbid, because this would just be an epic disaster if it was going to come right into Savannah. uh unabated, yo know, unimpeded. Um, you know, certainly the low country of South Carolina, Bufort, maybe Charleston, those were all worries of mine, you know, and and a lot of other people, too. And I think that accounted for the very high number of
people visiting the website and watching my videos and we were starting to grow
the Patreon a little bit more and a little bit more. Um, and it's it's interesting because as we get to the end of this episode, something will happen with Irma that'll really in a positive way. It's a very negative thing and a very stressful thing. We're going to get to it. Setting it up here, teasing it out as they say. But this negative thing that happens turns into a very positive thing uh down the road where failure becomes the impetus for success. And uh, boy did it.

So, that is my plan. You know, pack
everything up, get as much stuff in Wednesday night to the Tahoe that I can. Thursday, finish that up. I'm doing video updates along the way, of course. One a day, if not more. Very busy with that. Lots and lots of social media interaction. Um, and really also kind of

putting my family on guard that, yo know, the leftovers of this might come up here. You know, I'm not entirely sure. You know, this was going to be a tricky one, but for now, it looked like
Irma would pass through the Turks and CO, southern Bahamas, skirt the north coast of Cuba, and then come into the
eastern part of the Florida Strait and
southeast Florida with a landfall Sunday
pretty much right over Miami as a category 5. All right, so let's just say
that again. The official forecast at day
four, 2 pm Sunday, the center, the core

was forecast to be right over Miami as a
category 5. That is a very rare thing to
see. And believe me, it started this

gigantic wheel in motion. I use that
term a lot of people panicking, freaking
out, whatever. and I would encounter the
results of that once I eventually got to Florida. So, let me look over on the Twitter timeline. That'll help me out um as we go through here. A nice framework of everything. Um so, one of the uh
radar images here, this actually goes back a few hours, at least that I'm looking at. I'm going to save one a little further up the timeline, but at
1:00 in the afternoon there on the 6. So, I'm backtracking just a hair, uh, cuz I referenced the 8:00 p.m. advisory
update or whatever on that graphic that I just saved. I think it was 8:00 p.m. Yep. Uh but yeah, looking back at 1:00 p.m. earlier that day, um and I do remember this being a Wednesday, we were over at the school again, helping out, my wife and I, with uh volunteering,
lunch duty as we call it, and just talking to the parents, showing them the radar scope of the Virgin Islands. And
this town called Roadtown um in the British Virgin Islands, I think, or is that Virgin Gorda? Anyway, Roadtown was in the eye, the southwest eye. And of course, um, that put St.

John in the core, and we talked about that in the last special episode there with Brent and company, but it was just terrifying like to know what they were going through. Then as we scroll up and I'm, you know, moving along in the timeline here. Again, lots and lots of interaction on Twitter especially, uh,
people with questions and, you know, I tried as best I could to answer those questions. Where do you think it's going to go? Do you think it's going to be a Charleston problem? You know, just it's constant. But I actually embrace that

and I think it's a a positive that people reach out to me for information and I do the best I can to point them in the right direction. Um sometimes it's
not good news. You know, it's just the way it goes. Some of these hurricanes get up there and it's terrifying and it could be very, very much life-changing. and Irma looked like it would be that situation eventually for South Florida, but we still have to get it past Puerto Rico through the Bahamas and maybe some interaction with Cuba. I don't know how many followers I have in Cuba, but um it's important and I I was on top of it. I mean, living in the office and yo
know, the iPhone such an important tool,
literally a computer in your hand. We all know that. And no matter where I am, I can post something. It's instant. It's just amazing. Um, it's got its bad side, its dark side, right? We all know that too. It could become an obsessive tool.
But I think for work related stuff like this where news is changing hour by hour
at a minimum and sometimes minuteby minute, it is certainly a very important tool that I can carry around in the palm of my hand. The old iPhone there and all the tools that are baked into it. And
using Radar Scope, I was able to convey
even with just oneword tweets what was
going on. And here's a good one from 6:30 p.m. So, several hours later now
from that 1:00 one. And uh again, Irma
is just northeast of San Juan. Um and
the core is is, you know, far enough offshore that they were definitely not near the core. But I'm going to save this as picture number two because it is really one for the record books. This is such a stunning image of Irma's core.

And I hope you do get to uh take a look at it. Uh just the round appearance as
one lone lightning bolt in the eye for some reason. And it has an outer wind
maxima trying to take shape. Um and just
the jagged perfect spiral. I mean it was

from a structural standpoint and tropical meteorology. This was utterly
fascinating. It really was. But we know
that it is extremely dangerous at the same time. And I just thought, man, when
this gets to Florida, like again, that
countdown clock is going to start probably already has at this point really to zero and I have to get this
right. So, again, posting updates and so
forth. Um, here's a GFS shot that I did

from the Insep site, clearly cuz it's just a certain look to it that looks different. And it even says it in the URL there. This must have come off my iPad. Yeah, says it up in the corner there. 6:43 p.m. uh that day, the 6th,

uh, off the NSEP site. And the tweet was, and I will save the image for you,
18Z GFS 123 hours out. So that's just
basically 5 days. And I just I posted
the image. That's all I said. Like that was the tweet. And Irma uh was in, yo

know, basically just north of Charleston. And um it was just like,

what is this really going to do? Yo know, that's 5 days out. And it was a solid looking hurricane. um in just just west northwest of Charleston inland over South Carolina basically the low country right and that
was a big consideration because Charleston's storm surge threat the low country as a whole is enormous so I have to emphasize really a lot
about this choice I was going to make and I remember Matthew the year earlier you know like I went down to Florida it was a very close scrape the core almost got to uh New Simra Beach where I was for Matthew and then Matthew went up into North Carolina, you know, and um was Irma going to do the same? This of course being peak season, not October, although October 7th, which is roughly when Matthew was still kind of peak season, but you know, this was literally the peak time of the hurricane season, Irma was going to be a lot stronger. So, even up in Wilmington, this is another shot. Let's see what time this was. I went to Walmart at 7:44 p.m. and uh the

the water the shelves were bare and I
tweeted that picture as well. This is picture number four. People even in Wilmington already, you know, getting ready and not messing around. Um and
then to add to all of this, this is just remarkable. We had Irma. We also had Jose out there

to the well to the eastsoutheast of Irma
in the central tropical Atlantic and it was aimed in the general direction of the northeast Caribbean. Really weren't sure where it would end up. So that was an issue. And then we had Katia also a hurricane. We had three hurricanes simultaneously in the Atlantic basin. Katia was way over in the southwest Gulf and Irma of course is where it was already talked about it. and Jose was lurking out there. I'll save this. It's just remarkable. Uh this is picture number five. And it was funny, too, because there was a few people that were saying after Harvey that we really weren't
going to have much else, that the pattern was going to change, more sinking air, um you know, shear, just a negative
pattern. And those people were wrong
very very much so because we had Irma
and Katya and Jose sitting out there. Uh
and again I'm doing video discussions left and right talking to people on Twitter and I'll say it again that part
of my job I relish that. I like that interaction. It doesn't bother me. And I
guess one good thing about not having
500,000 followers or a million followers or whatever uh is it doesn't get too
overwhelming. You know, I can still handle it cuz I really do try to respond
to everybody when I can on social media.
Um I do see people that'll post something and it could be good, bad, indifferent and they get responses and they they say nothing. you know, there is no engagement and like why do yo even have social media if you're not going to be social, but you know, do
your own thing, I guess. But I like being social with people because I feel like I know stuff and I want to help people, right? So there you go. Uh, so
finally we get up to the 7th and my
first tweet that morning, this is Thursday the 7th, said, "I'm getting ready to leave for Florida, but before I do, one last video discussion." And let's see what time I posted that. I was
up early, 7:00 in the morning there. Um,
and then people are um, tweeting back at me that I am evacuating, you know, take care of yourself. Uh, so you're going to go to Florida and then you're going to bring Irma back to Wilmington. You know, Hardy Har. Um, just different responses and

again love it and I like this one that
people respond to me positively. It's a good good feedback. Outstanding explanations said one person sharing with our disaster relief alliance shortly. And uh this was a disaster um

response uh group uh church-based. A lot
of them those grassroots efforts are religious-based organizations and they're small but mighty and they can really get out there and do stuff quickly. So it was really really cool to
jump right back in after some sleep and
be ready to go. Um, here's an interesting tweet though from Eric Webb and uh he and I were interacting more and more as we got through 2017. I was starting to learn about more people out there in social media world on Twitter especially, you know, Jack Sllin comes to mind. We had Eric Webb and um and and
plenty of others. Tyler Stanfield is another one. Um and we all know Levi, Dr. Cowan, and Levi Cowan. But Eric
posted a sea surface temperature graphic

of the southwest Atlantic and his tweet was that Irma's intensity ceiling is
certainly higher once it nears the southwestern Bahamas. Sea surface temperatures about a degree Celsius warmer that than any point along its
path thus far. And I was just like what?
And he was right. This is and I'm going to save this image too. This is important. Um, it's funny because this I
don't this might be the first time I saved an image that wasn't from me, yo know what I mean? That I posted, but this is a really important one because it's showing these ridiculously high water temperatures, 30 31 Celsius, so
you know, mid to upper 80s, and Irma was
going to go right through it on its approach to Florida. And these were the warmest temperatures already, you know, in its path already. Like you think
about Irma's history. Okay, so it hit
185 mph out over an area where the water temperatures were uh about 82 maybe 83 and it was going to

be headed towards water temperatures that were like 86 87. So we really were worried. I mean that's
that was very serious. Um, so I was
like, uh, to Eric, I said literally, uggh, this will be the greatest test, uh, uh, of that my equipment has ever faced. And
I was really kind of nervous about that. So, I want to talk about that a minute before we get into the first break here. What was the equipment going to be? So, let me scroll up. Uh, I do know that I've got a shot here. So, yeah, this is good. So, I'll go ahead and save this picture before I forget. Uh, it looks like a complete disaster if you if yo look at it when and I hope you do, but
I'll explain as they say. Um, the back

of the Tahoe was packed and ready to go.
So, what did I have? I think it's important to remember where we were
equipment wise in 2017.
So, I've got five of these remote cams
that are Logitech Broadcaster. They go
straight to Ustream. I've got five of those and they are in these a little bit larger than a Lunchbox uh Pelican cases.
Storm case is the actual brand name. Just reminding you of all this. So, I've got five of those. I'm going to take one
weather station with me. And remember
back in 2017, the way I would deploy this the weather station is that we had like a 30in to

5ft, you know, 60-in just depending on the situation. And I was going to take a 60-in steel pole and then you or me

would splint that basically with Gorilla tape to a vertical post on a bridge. And

you layer that Gorilla tape and it becomes like you welded it on there. I'm not kidding. It's unbelievable. And uh
the animometer would sit on top of that and then the case, which was like triple
the size of a briefcase, had all the uh the little computer in there. It was like a little Acer and it had this little software on it. And um that would
be the weather station. And I'd have the uh RM Young animometer and I think the
RM Young pressure sensor. So, I was going to take one of those, five cameras, the drone, of course, you can see that sitting in there. And if you do look at the picture, it looks like a mess, but it's an organized mess. And um
uh of course we had the uh the the weather station on top of the Tahoe, yo
know, had an animometer on top. And it's been so many years now since I've have I've have not had an equipment uh decked out vehicle that it's hard to remember actually. Well, yeah, I had all that. So I could get wind readings wherever I might be uh right there on the dashboard because we had the little wind tracker on there and I have my Davis instruments for the pressure. So, you know, I'm a rolling weather station as well, but I'm not going to be sitting in the core of this thing uh down in the Keys or whatever. That's just suicide. I'd figure all that out later, of course, but that's where we are equipment wise. And and I was going to bring the weather

balloon stuff. Herby Carrie would bring the helium tank. He had that. and he and
Todd, Todd Pale, they were going to come over from Houston and join me in
Florida. Uh, and we would figure everything out once they got there. And,
you know, it's a two-day trip for them or whatever. Um, knowing Carrie, he probably drove it all in 17 hours or something. Him and Todd trading off. But
that's what I uh I have. Now, I want yo to look at the picture if you can. I'm going to like not pressure you, but yo got to check this out. It looks like a mess. I know there's all sorts of stuff in there and it's looks like it's thrown about. And I mean, you do what you got to do, right? Again, it's an organized mess. Um, couple gas cans and uh you see

some Pelican cases, the Herby stuff, but
you also see my sneakers that are sitting in there. So, why am I putting my sneakers in the back? What am I wearing? So, I want to bring this up before I go to the break. Um, and the
these are just things that I remember because you'll see. I was loading everything up and I was wearing my
slides. I usually don't wear sneakers in and around the house. It's just not comfortable for me. So, I wear slides, you know, and um going in and out of the garage, putting stuff in the the Tahoe. and my son, one of them at the time,
whoever was home, I don't know, doesn't matter. Um, they had a
uh like a weight bench deal with barbells and a bar, you know, to to for like lifting weights. And the bar, which
had uh probably 25 lb weights on either
side, was sitting in the garage long
ways against sort of off to the side,
but still within the travel path of
walking through the garage. It's out of the way, but not completely. Yo understand? So, at some point as I was
coming back into the garage from putting something in the Tahoe, my right pinky toe slammed into that

bar, the very edge of it, you know, that sticks out. And I mean, full force like you're walking. You can imagine what your stride is like. And bam. I mean,
absolute, you know, 100% full speed as I
was walking. snapped it. Just boom. I went inside. I

remember I like jumped from the impact,
opened the door, ran inside and just
divebombed onto the sofa holding my my

foot. And Daphne was 2 years old. And

you know, she was like, you know, what's wrong, daddy? And the pain was seething

where your whole body hurts. Like, oh my
goodness, it it I felt like I was going to pass out. It was truly an epic fail

of just everything. Like, why was that thing there? How did I hit it? I should have been wearing shoes, whatever. like and it took me I think 30 minutes to be

able to just catch my breath and
move again and it started swelling up and I didn't break my pinky toe I don't think I I mean who knows man that little piggy toe everybody smashes it at one point in their lives but this is important to the
story because that's why my tennis shoes were in the back because there's No way
in heck I'm going to be putting shoes on anytime soon with that busted toe, yo
know, cuz that would really hurt. That would be adding insult to injury. So, there's that little story for you. All right, so we'll take a quick musical break and when we get back, I hear from
somebody in the Caribbean that they were
still alive.

All righty. be back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway continuing. We're up to the 7th of September, 2017. And I finally hit the road and I'm going
to go from Wilmington out 7476 to I95

and then turn south and go through South Carolina, Georgia. By the way, might have said this before. If not, I'll say it now. South Carolina is supposedly
about 200 miles from border to border from North Carolina to Georgia, but I think it's more like 350. Same with the Florida panhandle. You get your mile markers and I really think instead of being one mile apart that they have lied to us for decades and it's actually 2.7
mi or whatever. It just seems like it's infinitely longer than it really is. And if you've driven those routes, yo agree, I'm sure. But, uh, all kidding
aside, it's go time. Everything's packed. I'm all set. I'm ready to go. And I'm going to say again, I was nervous. I was thinking about how big
this could be as an opportunity to show
that these cameras are going to really do something amazing. And we're talking about a huge population area with Miami and then possibly up the east coast, the southeast uh east part of Florida, southeast United States, maybe Charleston. There was just a lot at stake here. And then, you know, the possibility of putting this weather station up and uh getting some historic data from that. Uh I was excited, but I
was also very very nervous, you know, that that I was going to have a huge spotlight on me putting it all out there. And you know that's the risk with this is you hype everything up. I've got all this equipment. We're going to do an amazing job and then if stuff doesn't work, you can look very bad. We still had the app Hurricane Impact at this point. It's uh on iOS and Android and
I'm updating that. It's doing okay. Um we've got our Patreon. We've got our live YouTube streaming via the YouTube app. So things were very positive moving in a a good direction. And this was
going to be a very very big test. And
mention it again that Carrie and Todd are going to be heading over towards Florida uh themselves. And Carrie was
going to bring in addition to the helium tank uh something like 40 extra gallons of gasoline because we were already seeing huge evacuation numbers coming up
out of Florida uh from southeast Florida
and the east coast. People were just like, "I'm gone." and we already had hurricane watches and a storm surge watch up for South Florida and the Keys.
So, it was time that that big wheel is
really in motion now. So, I'm on the highway and get to South Carolina listening to public radio cuz they're talking about the possibility of impacts in Charleston and they're getting ready to do evacuations down there. And it was it was just this thing like I talk about again that wheel analogy. Part of that big wheel in motion is just all of the stuff that happens with government officials, with the media reporting, with people, the general public. It's just it's a huge mechanism that gets put into motion. It really is. And every one of them is different. So, I'm tuning into all of that on the radio and occasionally checking in on social media. And I get a little uh a buzz or

whatever on the phone. Um, and let me
see what time this was. Um, so this is
about noon or so. So I guess I left at a decent hour. Um, let's see what time.
I'm just making sure I get all my times right. Uh, so the picture of the Tahoe where I packed all that stuff up. That was at 11:49. So I must have left um at

a fairly decent hour. And I'm driving down I 95 and I get this notification
from Facebook Messenger and all it says

we're alive and it was Mirco and I was

just I mean almost tears in my eyes and like yes and he was there. He was like
we made it and um he sent me a picture.

That was one of the first things he did and I could not believe my eyes. I mean, it was just incredible. And it was a picture of his weather station uh readout, his console.
And I'm going to save this for you. Of course, I am because this is truly historic. And the time stamp on the
weather station is 5:45 a.m. This is the
day of when it went over St. Bart. And
um the pressure was 919.9 millibars. The

uh relative humidity was 78 and the air temperature was 274 which is Celsius.
And you that's about 81°. So they were in the eye and the eye warmed up to 81°

and 9/19 on the pressure. Absolutely
incredible. And I was I couldn't believe it that he he sent me that like the the presence of mind to do that knowing that
I wanted that data and that it would be important to share with the world. So I tweeted that out and it of course had huge engagement which it should you know
uh people were stunned it to the hurricane center so forth and so on. So
then using Facebook um messenger like where you can call people over Facebook. Yeah, we even we had that even back in 2017. Um he called
me and we spoke and uh as I drove and it

was just riveting and I tweeted about
all that. I said just got off the phone with the gentleman, his name is Mirao Pharaoh St. Barts. He said almost all of the island is destroyed. He said nobody knows why they have communication, but that a lot of people are and uh they
all have reception for some reason. So amazing. There's this massive destruction. He says he doesn't know of any fatalities, but obviously we can't confirm that. And they're very worried about Jose coming. What do I know about it? I was like, well, it could do this, it could do that, whatever. And then he said, and this was very stark. One last point he said he warns us here in the United States not to mess with Irma. And
I said I would think that he knows what he's talking about. So that conversation
with um with Mirao was just an amazing

moment in my career that I had met him
over the internet, heard about his anxieties leading up to Irma, gave him the best advice I could. His house was heavily damaged. He and his girlfriend, now it's his wife, the dog, they all came through. He's got communications. And what does he do? He sends me a picture of the weather station. And I remember thinking how much that meant to me that he thought of me to do that. Yo
know, it just really touched me. And it
was a moment and I I thoroughly relished it, you know, that wow. I mean, it's just one of those benchmark core memories that I will never forget and just so happy that he was safe and I knew of course that he had a long road ahead of him with the recovery process and he was certainly very worried about Jose and you know later on Maria would be headed their way generally. So they had a lot of, you know, stuff to deal with, but they were alive and in the coming days he did send pictures of the damage and I shared that as well. And I was kind of his conduit to the world and
he appreciated that. He wanted people to know what happened in St. Bartholomew and I did I did the best I could and got it out through whatever channels that I had available to me. So, I kept on going
and uh moving down I 95
uh finally Georgia, eventually North Florida, and of course my target area is New Simra Beach. And I stopped somewhere
near Daytona. Uh let's see what time this was. I got the drone out. It's about 8:00 in the evening. And I got that drone out, my DJI Phantom 2. That's

what I had back then because the evacuation traffic coming north along 95

was just remarkable. And I believe that

I remember that the moon was up and so
there was this like very interesting
look to the sky. There was some low clouds. Um it just kind of a foroding

uh appearance to everything. the air was very thick with the humidity. I mean, come on, it's peak time of hurricane season. And, you know, just seeing the
the drone shot um was incredible. and I

shared it uh on social media and I

remember I talked to my friend Dan Summers over in Collier County because it was looking a little bit like yo
know there was some worry well what if these westward trends continue because remember folks from the get-go the fifth
and the sixth as Irma's going through the northeast Caribbean the track was like right into the eastern side of Florida and then maybe
just offshore depending on which model suite or which run you looked at, yo know, like it was um not etched in

stone, but it it looked like the Florida West Coast was going to be okay. Uh but we know how that goes. And so Dan Summers, he's emergency management director and u other he wears many hats
over there in Collier County, believe me. But we had a conversation. And I remember telling him about all this evacuation traffic coming north and he
was discussing how they were a little concerned, you know, that these westward trends were not over. And they certainly mentioned that in the National Hurricane Center discussions and it was something
we had to watch, you know, was this going to keep moving west more and more.
So, on I went uh wasn't far at all from
New Simra Beach and the condo that I'd be staying in. Um, and around 11:00 the
advisory came out and I tweeted out uh
from the NHC just now, hurricane and storm surge warnings issued for South Florida and the Florida Keys. So, it was
gradually ramping up, you know, it it just was and I could feel that. I can I
can feel that intensity of everything
like the heat slowly getting turned up. I feel that and it it makes me work harder. It makes me focus more and I was
really thinking about where are these cameras going to go. And one plan that I
had in place already was to meet a

friend of mine who I had met just that year at the Mississippi State Severe
Weather Symposium. This guy named Taylor Trogden who was on the storm surge unit at the time at the National Hurricane Center. And he and I had been in contact
after my presentation. He presented at that symposium. I did as well, showing our 2016 stuff obviously, and you know, everything to date up to that point. And
he said that he had a um a condo, his

house, whatever, his condo house. Is that what they're called? His condo uh
in Bickl. And I was like, "Okay, where's Bickl?" I didn't know. And it's down there in Miami. It's a really nice area of Miami. and he said he's got an amazing view
um I think off to the east roughly something like that from the 19th floor.
And if I'd like to put a camera on his balcony, I'm more than welcome to do so. We just got to figure out how to get me up there cuz he's probably going to be locked in uh to the hurricane center, you know, dialed in there and he's not getting out for a while. And so that was certainly a possibility that I was willing to entertain um because it was looking like depending on the approach of Irma that Miami Dade

County could get a pretty nasty surge
and you know to see Bickl and and that area is already having rainy day rainy
day the opposite sunny day flooding. It
floods too when it rains believe me. Um, and that that's still definitely valid even though I screwed that up. Very heavy rain in Miami. They get flooding problems and but they do they have sunny day flooding as well with they call them the king tides and so a storm surge from
a category four or five hurricane. Of course that's going to be potentially catastrophic and historic. Um, so he
offered up his condo. We just need to figure some stuff out. So there's that. Also, at the 11:00 advisory package,
National Hurricane Center had their hands full. They have Katya, I talked about that, and Jose and of course Irma.
And I mean, stuff was just maxed out.
Uh, so I finally get to the condo and I

prepared I think another video update
that night and a lot of questions coming in to me from uh social media and I

think I set up a uh camera temporarily
uh on like the balcony or something from New Simra Beach. Uh this was now September the 8th. Uh, it's after midnight, so I said one last video post before getting some much needed sleep. Just a quick glancing over of the latest GFS versus the ECMWF, and that was 12:48
a.m. And, uh, then I got some sleep.
Yay. Very important. And then, so later

in the day on September 8th, this is 8:26 a.m., um, I guess I set up some

kind of a camera cuz I tweeted it. uh
live camera from New Simra Beach where I'm currently working on plans to set out special equipment and so forth. Then I did another video discussion. Very busy with those. And then I said, "Yeah,
cuz people were asking if I'm going to leave it there." And I said, "Uh, this was at 9:45 a.m. Uh uh it's just a
temporary shot. I will be leaving here and the camera will go mobile at that point." So, I guess what I did is took
my iPhone that I was using to stream to
you uh YouTube, I guess. Maybe Ustream,
but maybe it was on YouTube. Must have been YouTube. Uh probably just clamped it to the balcony of the room uh that this guy Mark was letting me use at New Simrna Beach. So got my sleep and got
going the next day and had more and more interest from people obviously with the attention that Hurricane Track was getting more and more interest from people to uh you know get involved with the website, maybe sign up on Patreon or get our app. Um and talking about the
app just a little bit, it was as I it was still kind of functional. I guess it was doing okay. Uh all five of these cams were hopefully going to go in there. I was, you know, the Twitter was in there. Um, but I mean, it still had
some issues and people would email and say, "Well, this is not working or that's not working." And it was kind of giving me a little bit of a headache, you know, like I had enough to worry about. But the app was there and, yo
know, doing whatever I could with it. It's called Hurricane Impact. And, uh, it's no longer in existence, of course, and I'll talk about that eventually. I promise. I'm going to do a special episode about the app. Um, yeah, but
there was just more and more interest as you could imagine, you know, and people going to hurricanetrack.com and my social media and so forth. So, uh, hit
the road finally and, uh, I posted this

picture that I will save for you fine folks. 11:42 a.m. I'm out of there. Uh,

left New Simra Beach. This is picture number 10. And uh this is a great
picture. It it's kind of bland, yo know. You'll see if you look at it, but it's really the picture really does speak a thousand words because there's nobody on the interstate but me. And I I I began
noticing that that like, dude, I'm one
of the only people heading south. There was an occasional other vehicle, but that was it. It was really, really
weird. And you don't see that very
often. I've seen it before with Floyd 1999. My partner that was helping me for that when Eddie Smith and I saw I95 that way
when we were coming north out of Jacksonville, Florida back to North Carolina. There would be many, many minutes in a row that nobody would be in
the northbound lanes of I95. And in this
case, it would be a minute or two that I'd have the whole interstate to myself. I mean, are you kidding me? That's just that's bonkers. So, I'm streaming live
from uh the
um I guess I'm streaming live straight to Ustream cuz that's what I said. I said live vehicle camera from our public Ustream as I head south to Miami. So, I must have been using Ustream as well cuz you they had an app like YouTube does and uh you're able to stream pretty easily. Um and that by the way was my
goal. So, let's talk about that a little bit. My next stop is going to be Miami and I

was going to stay at the like a Hilton

Garden Inn uh somewhere in Miami. It was
pretty easy to get a room. Um I mentioned that in the special episode with Brent and Jen and CJ that all these
people that were evacuating, I mean, they cleared out and they weren't staying in the hotels down there. They didn't want to have anything to do with a category 4 or five hurricane clearly
because I was able to get a hotel. And in 2017, I'm sure that I'm using the Hilton app.
I mean, why wouldn't I be? And so, I'd get on there and boop, book a room, no problem. Hilton Garden in down there. It's funny. I could probably look it up if I really dug deep, deep, deep at which one I stayed at. But I needed to
get into Miami, meet Taylor and get uh

something from him like a key fob and
then go and install the camera. But there was a limited like I had to do it at a certain window and he had to meet me at a certain time. So there was a lot of timing issues. I had to go to the hotel and unload some stuff, maybe charge some things, and there was just a lot going on and a lot of things that had to come together. And um at the same

time, Carrie and Todd are in route and
they're asking, "Okay, what do you uh want us to do?" And I said, "Well, why don't you guys go down 75, the west side

of Florida, and I arranged for them to
stay with a long time supporter of our
project, Jeffrey Cisk. Known him since
you like the late 20200s. Is that what
you would call it?" like it's like 0809 somewhere around there is when I first met him online and then we met in person
in 2010 and he has been a big supporter
and so many ways over the years long long time and he had uh his house there
near uh Bradenton I think something like that um used to be in Homosasa Springs but anyway he had room for uh Carrie and
Todd to stay there so they didn't have to worry about hotel rooms on the west coast because that's where everybody went. They all left the east coast, southeast coast of Florida. And as CJ talked about, either people filled up those rooms all the way up to Orlando and then pretty much everywhere else out of Southeast Florida. There's like, I don't know, five or six million people in Southeast Florida. And a good chunk of them left. I don't have the exact numbers, but a lot of them went over to the West Coast. Oh, we'll just go over there. It's a couple hours away. And so they took all the hotel rooms along the I75 corridor
and that certainly became a problem later. Right. So Carrie and Todd are
going to stay with Jeff at uh Bradenton
and I'm going to go down to Miami, stay at the Hilton Garden in and I'm going to meet up with Taylor and uh get this key
fob thing from him that'll open his condo. and then I'll figure out when I'm going to go put the camera there cuz the the thing's only going to run 30 hours and it's all about timing. So, um I I go

on south, keep moving. Um I think at one
point, for whatever reason, I think it was Melbourne, I stopped to get lunch, and then I went over to A1A and I just
rode down the coast. Um, I really wasn't
in a big hurry, but for I don't know 10
or 15 miles, I just went down the coast
there along A1A and eventually got back over to 95. But I remember distinctly that I did that. Uh, just kind of scoping things out. Had the opportunity to do so. Again, I wasn't, you know, in a massive hurry. Um,
so I I get closer to Miami and um, yo

know, we're looking at the 5:00 p.m. advisory package and stuff is just not
looking good to say the least, you know,
and I finally get into the Miami area

and let's see what time this was. 5:16 p.m. Uh, I I will never forget this. Um,

I'm coming down 95 and I had to get into
downtown towards Bickl and there's

basically nobody there. You know, it's 99% empty.

And I'm not talking about like Christmas day empty and most people are at home or they went to church services or something. No, no, no, no. This is like
end of the world, you know, movie. I am legend. any of those movies. What was it? Uh, Vanilla Sky or something like or Magnolia, I don't know. One of those movies with Tom Cruz where he's in Time Square and there's not a soul around.
That's me riding into Miami. And I remember there was this thunderstorm with a big rainfoot, big rain shaft um,
east northeast of me coming into whatever this offshoot road was that
branches off 95 to go into Miami proper.
and I took some video of that and I uh
tweeted it and let me just check and see because for some reason it doesn't show up in my Twitter archive. So, let me

bump the time frame here a day or so.

Just monkeying with the archive stuff here. Uhhuh. So, let's back up a little bit. see if I
can find that because it was a very uh poignant moment that I will never

forget. And uh um yeah, so I yeah,

here's the video. So uh I said pretty intense cell moving into the greater Miami area and it was just empty.

Absolutely phenomenal empty. I I just I'll never forget it. Um, and I remember
I uh either tagged or heard from uh John

Morales, uh just a super important

legacy guy down there at what is it? NBC 6 in uh in Florida. Um and that video, a

lot of people looked at that video. I mean, it was something else just to see no traffic. So I did I said that
virtually no traffic in Miami. And uh so
I get downtown and to Bickl and I texted Taylor and he
met me over there and showed me the condo. It is where it is. Here's what you need to do. Take the elevator to the 19th floor. Remember that. Very important. Take the elevator to the 19th floor. Write that down. And um use this
fob like a key fob. And you know it's
like a hotel room. we touch it against the the thing and you can get into my condo and he said it's it's kind of messy in there, you know, disregard it. Uh whatever. He's his guitar was in there or something and um uh you know,
just don't judge me or something like that. It's like, no, man, whatever. Forget it. It's fine. I really appreciated him offering this up. So, I got the the key fob and then I went over to the Hilton Garden Inn and I was like,
"All right, I'm going to go ahead at this point and um set up the uh that

evening the stuff down in the Keys. This

is the night of September 8th. So, one
very interesting uh thing or turn of events that was a
very big positive for me was that this
guy, his name is Mike Adams. He's from Brigantine, New Jersey. I'd met him several years earlier for Nor Easter stuff. And uh he was down there and he
had texted me. I think that he was up at
Palm Beach Gardens or somewhere and I said, "Hey, uh, if you're not doing anything, would you come down,
meet me at my hotel and help me set this

stuff up down in the Keys?" And he's like, "Sure." You know, give me an hour or so and I'll be there. So, I go to my
hotel and I unload some stuff, kind of
lightening the load in the Tahoe. And not long after he shows up and we left

and started making our way down to the Keys and there was still some people emptying out certainly. Um and I mentioned that on Twitter. Uh I said the Florida Keys have virtually been emptied out. I'm heading there to begin setting up equipment and you know I did more storm surges and so forth. Now, what's interesting is that evening, September
8th, and I'm going to save this screenshot for you because it's important. Uh that was at 9:00 in that
that evening, uh Hurricane Center put
out a special update or whatever. Irma
making landfall um on the Kamaguay archipelago of Cuba
as a category 5 hurricane. Hurricane warnings extended northward along the Florida Peninsula. So Irma actually made landfall briefly.

So it got tangled up with a part of Cuba. And that is absolutely critical to

everything that happens after that.

Heat

All righty. Back with you now. Stores from the hurricane highway. Continuing again. And we are up to the evening of September 8th and Irma has made landfall along Cuba. And that was a gamecher.
That was going to make things different. What would happen? How long would it stay over land? What's it going to do to the eye the eye wall really the the core? Is it going to unravel? Will it make the windfield larger? This was this
was an important step in the process of figuring out what
Irma is going to end up doing. Right. So, uh, Mike and I head down, um, US1 into

the Florida Keys, and honest to goodness, it was really, really easy. The drive, Florida City, you name it.
Very little traffic going in. Still quite a few people coming out, but not anything like bumperto-bumper, that's for sure. Now, here's one thing that's also important, an important sort of note along the way here. Uh, I had

probably close to a full tank of gas at this point. I remember filling up not far
from Miami and the Tahoe had a pretty big tank, 22 gallons maybe, and I wasn't going 75 mph. So, my mileage and and efficiency
was pretty good. But, you know, so
probably a little bit more than 3/4 of a tank going down to the Keys. Now, I'm not going all the way to Key West. That's too far. And it I didn't think it
was necessary, and it would certainly burn too much gas, and it would take a lot of time, and I have to get some sleep, and so does Mike, right? Mike will go back to uh Palm Beach Gardens after he's done helping me. So, the gas
situation was a little bit precarious. I

did have, and I thought this was pretty smart, uh, some dead drops, as they call
them, five gallons was waiting for me near Fort Lauderdale at Mike Watkins place. And then up in Orlando, Eileen

Jones also had five gallons. And all I
had to do is make sure I got to those different spots without running out first and I'd be okay. And then Carrie
would meet me at some point. He was bringing 40 extra gallons, maybe even more. A literal rolling fuel air bomb,
right? So, the gas situation wasn't too
precarious, but a good chunk and and CJ
talked about this in that special episode. Good chunk of Florida was out.
It was just ill planned for and part of it, you know, the reason the other part is just overwhelming. So many people evacuated. Many of them didn't have to, but they were worried about it, yo know. And Jen spoke to that, you know, Brent's sister, that, you know, leave. If you don't want if you don't want to deal with it, leave. And, you know, yo can't tell people not to evacuate. Yeah, that doesn't work, I guess, right? So, a lot of people did just that. And they took the gas with them. That was a problem. So, here was my thought, yo know, based on prior experiences. I figured between Florida City and

Marathon, which is about the extent of to where Mike and I would go, some gas
station along that route, will still have gas and they'll still be operational. It's not even raining yet, and I'll just tap the credit card thing or stick it in the chip reader, whatever the case may be. Woo! I get some gas. That has worked more often than not for me in the past. And I got spoiled from

that very good luck over the years. So
that was my I won't call it my plan because I already had a plan. The plan was I had this extra gas available, but I didn't want to ever get like scarily low, right? Start getting nervous. So on
the way down, every gas station that we saw, we would look over there and it look like it's got gas or the pumps on. And most of them we discovered were and
this was so weird wrapped up in this cellophane stuff like they must have taken these huge roll and I like where did they get this? Do they store it for just such occasions? Like every gas pump
was wrapped up like a mummy in plastic,
plastic wrap, tight, like layers of it.
And we would drive by one, you know, I
don't know what the a shell, an Exxon, uh, a Circle K, a Speedway, whatever.
And, you know, they were rope uh, not roped off, but you know, plasticked off. They were wrapped up. And I didn't worry too much about it. I got 3/4 of a tank. We're not going to be blasting down there at 80 mph to burn more gas than we should. Whatever. But it would be a nice thing to go ahead and top off, add 5 6 7

8 gallons if we saw one. That makes perfect sense, right? So that's sort of the plan, a side plan. If you see gas,
get it. So with all that, we we get down there. And what I was doing, and I
thought this was pretty darn clever, if I may say so myself, I was using the uh Hurricane app from

Eileen, Hurricane, Hurricane Pro, Hurricane HD. Our uh app didn't have a

good tracking map. It was just a static JPEG. I mean, it was okay. But hers was,

you know, really good because it was interactive. You could pinch, zoom, and see the center line on like what looked
like a street level map. It was pretty darn cool. And in this situation, I
wanted the weather station cuz, by the way, that's what we were going to do down there was set up the weather station. Remember, I brought one weather station with me. And we had all these cameras and I was going to go ahead and put the first of the live cams down
there. And uh we were well within the 30-hour window or whatever the case was. And I wanted the setup, the weather
station and the camera right on the center line. So, and I know the hurricane center says don't focus on the skinny black line, whatever I do when
something like this is important because I wanted the eye to go the core to go
right over the weather station. And with it being about a day and a half away,
almost 30 hours, something like that, I
thought we got a pretty good shot at this, you know, and you know, it's not going to move that much, a 30-hour forecast. And I really wanted the core to go over the station. So, we chose Vodaka Cut, which is this little small
inlet area near Marathon,
and it had the the bridge and the railing that was adequate to splint the
pipe to. And we, you know, recognized

that this is where it's going to be. And we uh kind of flipped the Tahoe around
and you could see the bridge, the railing, and we were streaming live and people could watch. And right before we were getting ready to get out and set everything up, the very first squall,
sort of this surface trough that gets like blasted out. It's like a shock wave that comes out from Irma comes rolling in the Florida Straits and into the upper Keys into the Middle Keys where we were. And man, it just lit up. The
lightning was just phenomenal. You could see the line of looked like a squall line was coming. And the the wind jumped
up and it was dry up until this point. Very humid, but still dry. And I remember all this dirt and dust and leaves and any trash that was in the road. All got kicked up and it got in my
mouth and in my hair and my eyes cuz we were trying to move equipment into place from the Tahoe. And then we had to sit in the Tahoe and let this pass. Wasting
time like you know because I'm tired.
I'm so tired and I still have a lot to do on the 9th you know I got to set the camera up and bickle and then I got to figure out what else I'm going to do. So, we waited the squall line. Uh, the
first band came in and we finally got
out and we put the weather station uh on

um vodka cut and I don't have a picture

of it on the Twitter that I can save
right now, but I did take pictures and
so basically just know that picture number 11 will be a picture of the setup. I don't know why I didn't tweet that. Like, let me just make sure I didn't. Like, what a fool. Why wouldn't I have tweeted it, but I didn't uh for
whatever reason. And uh but I will I'll find it. I got it on a hard drive somewhere. And be sure to look at that. It's a great picture. Uh Mike Adams took the picture for me and um it shows me

smiling with a thumbs up, exhausted. But we got that thing up and I was really really excited cuz it was working. It was sending wind data, pressure data, temperatures, too. You know, we got the air temperature and we had the live cam looking across this cut out toward uh

one of the uh the keys down there. And let me just look it up real quick. Why not? Uh I mean, if we were sitting around talking about this at dinner, I would do the same thing. I'd look it up on my iPhone, wouldn't I? Vodka,
Florida. There it is. Vodka bridge. I got a funny story about that, too. So it's US1 the overseas highway. It's called uh Vakut and it is part of

Marathon. So it's just before you get into Marathon and it looked across to
Key Colony Beach which by the way that's where Jim Eds lived for a number of years. If you know Jim Eds that's where he lived. So Vodka Cut Bridge and the camera was looking basically south maybe
souths southwest. Uh, and you can see Key Colony Beach in the distance and part of these uh little canals and
whatever. Uh, it's a place called the Fishtails Market where we parked and we put the camera and everything on that vodka cut bridge. Um, and before I
forget, cuz I might, I'm going to tell you the little funny story now. We'll jump ahead a little bit. Um, Irma came and went and it took until like October

or later. I don't remember, maybe December. It was a while, weeks and weeks later that I got back down there because it tore the place up of course. I think it was October um late October.
But anyway, I went down there to uh get everything. It was still there and um we
locked everything up, put a big chain around everything, locked it with these big padlocks. Uh and it it had gotten

salt and gunk in there to the lock and I I couldn't unlock it. uh to trying to
remember it. It was the the camera box, I think, something like that. Or maybe it was the weather station. But anyway, one of the one of the cases I couldn't get off, so nothing I could do. I banged
on it, hammered it, everything. Couldn't unlock it. So, um it was uh all I could

do. I just I tore the equipment out. I think it was the case for the uh the weather station. I really do. and it was still like on the bridge and chained to
the railing and then you had the mast and everything that was uh gorilla taped on there. So I tore the equipment out carefully, extracted the equipment and
um took everything with me and left the
pole and the yellow case. And I'm not
kidding for like 2 or 3 years, maybe longer, they stayed there. And in 2021,

the family and I went down there uh on
vacation and it was still there. And I remember I showed them. And then I think in 22 when uh Marcel, he's a good friend of the
project, went down to set something up for Ian. He said that they weren't there anymore. Somebody had finally gotten them. So there's that. So for several
years that stuff just stayed there and not bothering anybody and I couldn't get it off. So anyway, weather station is set up at Vodka Cut Bridge and uh Mike

Adams and I head out and I said it's
been a long night but a successful one as I have set up a weather station to measure the wind and the pressure. And let's see what time I tweeted that. Uh 3:50 in the morning. Holy Toledo.
God. So, get back to my hotel there, the uh
the Hilton Garden Inn. Mike Adams and I part ways. He heads back up to uh Palm Beach Gardens and I get a few hours of sleep and the next day uh coming up on
September 9th um I have to go to uh

Bickl and finally cuz I've been excited
about this set up the camera there at Taylor's condo.

Heat.

Heat.

All right, back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway continuing, folks. We are now up to the big day. It
is my turn to take one for the team and
go put a camera where no camera has ever
been before. Before we get there, let's just set the stage. Where are we in the timeline? It's 5:00 a.m. I get back to
the hotel in uh Miami area. This Hilton

Garden in Mike Adams went went on back up to Palm Beach Gardens. We were both so tired and just exhausted. Me definitely more than him. But we did it. We got the weather station and the camera system running down near Marathon at Vaka Cut. looking kind of southeast,

I guess, towards the open Florida
Straits out there somewhere. And Irma is
coming right at it. It is uh straddling Cuba, the core, getting tangled up over Cuba. So, I've saved the 5:00 a.m. advisory track map for you from the hurricane center. You take a look at that. That's picture number 12. And Irma
is sitting at 155 mph. So, it's weakened
just a little bit. uh and it's moving west northwest at 12. So just kind of skirting the coast of Cuba. And that's really really important because it did tear the core up just a little bit. And
in the long run that certainly spared extreme South Florida from horrific
damage. It was really bad as we're going to talk about. But yes, it is uh just
skirting the coast now as the sun would be coming up not too long after I get back to the hotel. I tweeted something here. Let me go and look see what time this was. Uh I said it's been a long night but a successful one as I have set up another weather station to measure the wind and the pressure and just still
trying to keep people up to date on everything. Finally got some sleep and woke up and did a screenshot and put it
on Twitter. Uh this was what time was
this? Take a look. This will be picture number 13 at 11:09 a.m. So, I got, yo

know, maybe 5 and 1/2 hours of sleep, something like that. You know how it is. You get there wherever there is. And I
mean, rarely do you just crash. I mean, I guess sometimes you do if you almost just pass out, but there's always this down period and you're looking on, especially these days, looking on social media, checking something. It's hard. But, uh, I got about 5 hours of sleep, we'll say. Definitely not enough, but better than nothing. And I get up and I posted this uh picture here, the screenshot from my iPhone. Picture number 13. I really hope you check it out. It's a screenshot from the app, the Hurricane Impact app. And 11:09 Eastern
time. The wind was 32. That's the 1 minute average with the peak gust during that minute at 47 milesPH, of course.
And the air pressure was down to 1,000 millibars. And there's just a tiny little uh video in there where you could play the Ustream uh feed from that
camera. So, I'm going to save this for you. Picture 13. Uh this was, you know,

ready. It was sitting out there uh ready to talk about taking one for the team. This camera and weather station was definitely going to do that. So, different people are tweeting back at me
and encouraging me, thanking me, etc. And I'm just like, yeah, feel like I'm in my own personal summer blockbuster movie, except that it's real. You know, I I said that to people. Now, one thing that I really, really appreciated and I had going on my behalf is my friend Zack
Fidella. You guys know him down on the Gulf Coast in the New Orleans area over at Fox 8. Now, um he was posting some
video discussions for me and I would grab those. was I don't remember where he would put them. Uh but I would grab them and then I would put them on my YouTube so I could at least keep these video discussions going and uh we put them on Facebook and YouTube and I really appreciated that. That was helpful. We had this team effort going. It was it was terrific. Um so here's one
thing and I'm going to save this too. This is a snippet from the 11:00 a.m. advisory. Now we're up to 11:00 a.m. Moving right along. This is picture number 14 and this is the hazards affecting land and the storm surge part and uh Cape
Sable to Captiva 10 to 15 ft above

ground if the peak surge occurs at the time of high tide 10 to 15 ft. Captiva
to Anamaria Island up to 10 feet 6 to 10
and uh Card Sound Bridge south of Cape Sable including the Florida Keys 5 to 10
feet and even up to Tampa Bay maybe 5 to 8 ft again depending on how everything
came together. North Miami Beach to Card Sound Bridge including Biscane Bay 4 to
6 ft. And then this is important is of
palm, South Carolina. South Carolina
down to Fernandina Beach, 4 to six feet above ground level. This hurricane was massive. And again, my I'm just one tiny

little drop in this big ocean of
information out there, doing my part, really trying to get the word out that this is going to impact millions and millions of people. It really will. Is starting to do so. Certainly internationally it's been doing so and getting ready to do so here in the United States. So my next play for me uh

is to go up to Miami uh or I'm I'm in
Miami. Sorry. I'm kind of on the outskirts of Miami. I don't remember exactly where. I bet I could pinpoint it, but doesn't matter. um sort of on the west side of Miami, not far from where I could get on US1 and get down
there that night before with Mike Adams
to set up all the equipment. So, I had to travel down into Miami through the
downtown area and get into Bickl. And I was going to go to my friend Taylor's condo right down there in Bickl. And he
was up on like I think the 19th floor,
17th or 19th. I believe it was the 19th floor. And I was uh I already had the
fob. I had everything ready to go. I had the camera set up in the box. All I had to do is take everything up to his condo, take the elevator up there. It should only take about 20 minutes to do all this. That was what I was thinking. And so I pulled up after driving down
into Bickl with hardly a person there. If you ever saw the movie 28 Days Later
from Danny Bole starring Killian Murphy,
um an all-time epic great zombie movie,

apocalyptic, whatever. They shot all these scenes in London and they worked with the police and shut the roads down around 4:00 a.m. They had a few hours where they would empty everybody out. no traffic, no people. And they did this repeatedly and they got these incredible practical effects. So, no CGI shots of

just amazing emptiness. So, they should have shot All right. If anybody's listening to this and you know a director of photography or a director of a movie or whatever, a location scout, come to a big city when there's a hurricane coming, a really bad one, and
you can shoot during the day and everybody's gone. like it's it's gift wrapped for you. And cuz this is what it was like down in Bickl going into Miami down into Bickl. Normally a very bustling, high energy, a lot of people,
a lot of traffic. Not the case. And I'm
going to prove it to you. All right. So, here's a picture. This is picture number 15. And this is my Tahoe there parked in

Bickl. And I didn't go out and get
everybody to leave. Hey, could you guys get out of my shot? Of course not.
There's one car down at the end and it might have been a security guy or a police officer. It's hard to tell. But I'm parked down there and there's nobody there. It was empty. It was so weird.
And people were saying that it almost has this postapoc apocalyptic feel like
Will Smith in New York City and I am legend. That's what this guy Tom said on Twitter. And then lots and lots of
people were noticing the Tahoe and they were like, "Man, Chevy needs to sponsor you immediately." That's incredible because I was talking about how the Tahoe standing alone down here has half
a million miles on it practically. It's like 433, something like that. So, getting close to a half a million miles. And uh people
were really impressed by that. They had been following all of our work since we had the Tahoe back in 2003. And then there it was, you know, in this amazing urban setting and there's nobody
there because there is a borderline category 5 hurricane coming that has scared the pants off of millions of people and it has caused all kinds of chaos. And that big wheel I keep talking about is turning. And there I am. It's time for me to do my thing and set up the camera. So, I go into the condo and I've

got the camera, uh, which is again a little bit larger than a lunchbox. I've got these plasticcoated cables to kind of secure
everything and then lock it. Not so nobody would steal it. It's going to be out on Taylor's balcony, but so it doesn't blow away. If it came loose from however I set it up, it would at least
not fall down 19 stories. and hurt somebody or there shouldn't be anybody there but you know we don't want it falling obviously. So uh I go into the

this is the flashbacks here. I go into the condo and um it's it's a really nice

multi obviously I'm going up to 19 uh
right down there in the heart of Bickl and just a beautiful area of part of Miami and I go in and there's obviously
uh a security not a doorman I don't
think there was a doorman like New York has but I walk in and there's a lobby and in the lobby there is a uh security
person at the ask and there's a couple of people in there already talking and I I've got my uh I'm wearing like a blue
um rain jacket, kind of a light rain jacket and it's got the Hurricane Track logo on it. And I'm wearing shorts and
of course cuz it's freaking hot and humid. And I got all my stuff, you know, uh, several pounds worth of equipment, you know, the batteries that go in this thing, the cable, the locks, and some zip ties, and everything I need. So, I
go in and I wait just a minute and the
security guy, uh, you know, may I help you? You know, right? And I said, "So, I'm here uh working with a friend of mine that lives up in whatever the unit was on 19, and I'm going to put a camera out there with his permission to monitor the hurricane." And this person didn't understand what I was talking about, yo know, like what are you doing? And I explained it again. And I gave Taylor's name. I said he's in unit such and such. And here's his FOB. He gave it to me. He works at the National Hurricane Center. And I might as well have just been talking, what do they say? Speaking Latin to this guy. It wasn't that he didn't understand English. He just had no idea what I was doing. Nothing that I
said registered to this person. And so
he's like, and he had and look, I get it. He had a lot on his plate and, yo
know, dealing with all of everything he was dealing with. And so he was like,
"Well, I got to clear it with somebody. What's his name again?" And this just went back and forth for a couple of minutes and other people are coming in and they want to go in different parts of the building. Maybe they are representing an owner or they are the owner. And I said, "Well, if you don't

mind, I am under a lot of pressure here, a time crunch. I know the room number. I've got the fob. I've got permission. You know, you can call the guy. Uh I'm
going to go ahead on up to 19 and get this done." And he said, "Well, yo can't use the elevator." And he says, "The elevators are on lockdown. You yo just they're locked. We're not operating the elevators." Now, it was a little breezy, but folks, we are nowhere near the hurricane. It's not even raining yet in Miami to speak of. Couple passing
showers, but they had already rolled up the elevators. So, I said,
and I can't believe I did it. I was like, "Well, that's fine. I will walk up
there and I got to get this done. I was
very adamant about this. I was not going to just let this guy dissuade me from
going. And I didn't understand that maybe he shouldn't be able to stop me. I've got permission. So, I walk over
around the back area of wherever this lobby is. And there's the stair access said stairwell. And up I go. I start
walking and he's dealing with other things. He said he's going to call somebody and a lot of stress going on, other people needing his attention. And I start the hike and I did a couple

things. One, uh, I was very steady going
up stair after stair, level after level. And then I did, what do they call it? Vlogging. You know, I took my iPhone, I aimed it towards me, held my arm out like a selfie, and I recorded me going

up these uh these stairs, and I want to
play one of these 23 second clips. This
is right off of Twitter because I posted it to Twitter. And I'm going to see if this will work uh in real time here. Um
and if it doesn't, I'll just splice the audio in. Regardless, here is uh what I sounded like, and
you'll see I'll I'll talk about what floor I was on and so forth. 23 seconds in the life of Mark as he's trying to climb up to the 19th floor of this condo in Bickl as Irma was approaching. So,
here I am having to walk up the stairs to the 19th floor to set
up this equipment right here.

I'm only on three, so wish me luck. So that's pretty funny there in that audio clip from my climb. I was only on the third floor and I was already huffing and puffing, definitely out of shape. But I kept going and I don't know

how long it took, but man, I was sweating. uh had that rain jacket on and it was
muggy in that stairwell, no moving air.
I did take some water with me. I stopped at, you know, various landings to take a
breather, drink some water. Certainly didn't want to have a heart attack or something. I mean, that would have been horrible, obviously. And I kept going.
And um I took several more videos as I
came around different corners and yo could see 12, 14,
15 and so forth. And by the way, there's
a I don't know a little decent section about this climb and this whole part of the Irma mission in the tracking the 2017 hurricanes, you know, tracking the
hurricanes 2017, whatever, whatever the heck it's called, it's in there. this whole climb. I should have called that chapter the climb. Um, but I kept going.

Finally get up to the 19th floor. I exit the stairwell and I am spent, you know,
where you can just feel the heat coming
out of your forehead and sweats just dripping down. Um, very very much
winded, legs hurt. like it was I mean 19
stories and I was definitely out of shape, you know, overweight the whole bit and but I made it, you know. Okay,
so I go down the the long hallway in
Taylor's condo. I felt like it was at the end of the hallway and so I go down
and it's he's got a fob, you know, yo just press it up. It's like a hotel. Like, you know, you take a a key like looks like a credit card and you hold it up against the thing and it lets you in your room these days. He had a key fob. Everybody knows what that is, I guess. And um I'm getting ready to go in the room or I just went in the room or something and I could hear somebody down at the end of the hallway. Uh the the
elevator opened. I could hear that and I could hear somebody coming out and I could hear a radio something about I think I've got him on 19 or something. It was the security guy. He was looking for me. Somehow I had beat him by
walking up the 19 floors. Um I don't
know if they took notes that I had said Taylor's room number or whatever his condo number, but security was coming. I
ducked into the room. I closed the door. I locked it and I felt like I should be
fine because I have permission to be here. I'm not trespassing. Like it this
should be fine. Like leave me alone, yo know. So I took a little bit of time to
just catch my breath, take a look at everything, make sure I still wanted to do this, you know, in this time that I took to drive from the Hilton Garden in,
which by the way, I checked out of. I was done at the Hilton Garden in and I was going to be staying at a different hotel in Miami. I'll talk about that in a minute, but you know, I just needed to make sure, okay, this is still what I want to do. And I went out on the balcony and um he had different plants out there and uh you know, planters and
various other things. And I could see down, you know, the 19 stories to the
street. Nobody out there. That was surreal. These big skyscrapers all around me. I mean, I'm in the heart of Bickl and I thought, you know, yeah, this will be a really good view just looking straight out. We'll see what happens. You know, if the core of Irma comes through, there's probably going to be Let's turn that off. That's annoying.
It's probably going to be uh some falling glass, you know, and other debris. And I wanted to make sure I
caught that live. Now, remember, all this is going to be live, you know, we hope. And uh so I took a little bit of
time to rig everything up. I had to use these really strong zip ties that Carrie had sourced. He found them. I mean, these suckers, you can forget it, yo know? Like they're not going to break. You'd have to like put them between two big pickup trucks or something and pull them apart. You're going to need some serious torque. These were not like I
don't even think you could buy these at Lowe's. These were from Amazon. industrial-grade uh 3/4 inch wide zip ties like the big big time, right? And this box was not going to come off. So, I zip tied everything on. Then, I put a chain around it and through part of the balcony railing and let it go like it
was running. I told Taylor uh may have heard back from him. I don't remember. But, I mean, he's working at the hurricane center. He's locked down. They're they're in there for the duration, but we're good to go. And I
looked out the little peepphole and the security guy, he's gone, you know, cuz it took me 20 minutes or so, probably.
And um I remember Taylor said, "Help
yourself to anything that you want in there." I might have gotten a water or something out of the refrigerator that was still cold, maybe, but that's about
it. And I gathered up whatever else I had with me. At this point, it wasn't much. Couple of extra zip ties, whatever. And looked out the peepphole
again, make sure the coast is clear. And I left. And I walked briskly down the long hallway back to the stairwell
because they said the elevators were not
operational. And I didn't want to chance
it. I mean, obviously the security guy came up the elevator cuz I told you I heard it. I heard it open. That distinct ding. And then you could hear the doors opening, somebody's coming out, and then I could hear his radio. And I just I was I wasn't going to challenge that. I at least was going to follow the rules,
whatever. You know what I mean? Like I'm not going to go against that. So going down 19 sets of steps, you know, the stairs is not as challenging as going up, obviously. And I did it. And I remember I popped out the door and I
walked by and I said, "Thank you very much. I got everything running. You all be safe out there. Kind of a smug and
you're like, and I went on by and they looked at me like, where did he come from? You know, cuz they're not going to go in Taylor's apartment, his condo.
That wouldn't be prudent. Uh, that's his, right? And they don't know what I did in there. And I did. I was very nice, but kind of snarky. Thank you. Appreciate it. Enjoy your hurricane. And
um I went out to the Tahoe and uh
tweeted some stuff. talked about it. Um, you know, that we got this camera up and
now we're up to, let's see what time this is. Um,
I tweeted out, uh, this is 4:30 and I

remember sitting in the Tahoe. Uh, Irma is obviously getting closer to the Keys. And I'll save this picture for you. Let's see what number we are up to in
the picture department. Number 16, I guess it is. something like that. Um it's a screenshot again of the app and
uh the wind was 32 gusting to 52 pressure down 7 millibars at 993. So that's you know it's Irma's
coming and um I'll save another one cuz

this is cool. You can get an idea of where I was trying to go. So,
um, this is the 9th and, um, I have to

go. So, this is what's interesting about it. We're up to the evening. I guess I should have established that. And if I haven't, I'll do it now. We are up to September 9th. Okay, this is a Saturday. I do my business in Bickl. Now, I have

to go across Alligator Rally. Well, it's
75, so I guess that's not really Alligator Alley. I think that's more 41 Tamiami Trail. I've got to go across to
Naples at this point in Marco Island and

set everything up there because Carrie
and Todd are in the area. They're going
to meet me there. So, that was the plan.
So, and remember, you know, I haven't slept much. Four or five hours. Five hours, we'll say. We'll be generous. All right. I'm very tired. And we are now up to basically 5:00. I'll save this
picture for you. And we have these tornatic thunderstorms rotating around
the northwest side of the outer circulation of Irma. And I'm on 75. Yo
can see this radar scope image picture number 17. I said again with the tornatic thunderstorms following me. I had this problem in Houston with Harvey.
Uh so I'm driving through torrential rain, blasting wind. You know, it's really cranking up. The windfield, the intensity, everything with Irma is
definitely next level. I mean, this was a fierce hurricane. Even if it was tangled up or just coming off Cuba, whatever the case may be, this was nothing to mess with. So, I want to look at um the 5:00 advisory at this point in

time. So, I'll jump back over to the hurricane center page. And there's 11
a.m. There's the intermediate at 2. All
right. Now we're at 5:00 p. p.m. And Irma is off the coast of Cuba. And top
winds are 125. So it's definitely weakened. And it is
now forecast, this is so important,
it is now forecast to cut across

just east of Key West, the core. And I

want to make that very clear. The distinction when I say it ever in any

podcast episode referring to a a tropical cyclone of any intensity from a
depression to a storm to a category 5. When I say it is supposed to do this, it is forecast to do that. When I say it,
it is the core. That's what I mean. I don't mean like the whole circulation. It is the core. That's what I'm talking about. All right. Want to make that very very clear. The core it, the eye,
whatever you want to call it, of Irma is forecast to cross basically so it would go over Key West, just to the east of it, something like that. then pass just

west of Marco Island and Naples,
making landfall at the southern part of Captiva, maybe Santael, and then riding
up just inland from there as a major

hurricane. And that was absolutely

catastrophic of a forecast for our
friends in Southwest Florida. This looked like it could really deliver a
devastating storm surge. So, I'm going to save this image. I like that we have all these records of these things here. And I think we're up to picture 18 or something like that. Yep. Um, so that's
where we are at 5:00 p.m. Okay. So,
moving on along. The total plan here, like we're we're

getting down to it, right, is to get over to the Naples area, call your county. I know my good friend Dan Summers over there. I've got permission to be wherever I need to be. This should be pretty easy except for the squalls
and whatnot. So, I get on over there in

the evening. We get to Marco Island and

we set up the camera at Marco. That
didn't take too long, fortunately. Um, I

believe we put it on a concrete light

pole or something like that at the Caxamus boat ramp uh where I had uh put

stuff going all the way back to '05 with
Wilma, right? And um Carrie and Todd and

I all worked together. Uh it didn't take too long, especially with that much help. And uh we're ready to go. That camera's running. That was pretty easy. I remember though, this is funny, on the way down there. Um we stopped somewhere

just into Marco Island and I needed to assess everything again and I got out of
the Tahoe and I don't know why I got
out, but I did. And I walked up under this awning cuz it was raining just a little bit. Nothing terrible. And the
video is running the the live stream and then Carrie is filming from his vehicle
and he's filming me and I'm just ducking out of that rain. Didn't like it cuz I don't like getting wet. And I know there is and this is the joke here. Carrie, you can hear him saying I might have put this in the documentary. I think I did. Tracking the hurricanes 2017. I think it's in there. There's a little short clip from Carrie and he you look at him,
he's like, "Look at him. He doesn't want to get wet, you know, kind of like a cat, you know, doesn't want to get wet." And he goes, "I think he chose the wrong business or something like that." It was really funny. Uh, and you know, the
explanation is is pretty easy. Who wants to be wet? And especially when you get back in a vehicle with air conditioning, it's such a horrible raw feeling. And you can sit there and say, "Well, dude, you chose the wrong business all yo want." It still doesn't change the fact that if you can prevent yourself from getting wet, why not? Right? So, there's
that. Um, so we stopped there, then we
went on down, set the camera up in Marco. But boy, this is remarkable. Um,

on the way, I'm going to save this for you. Uh, this is about 5:22 in the
evening. This is probably when I'm on the way to Marco Island, but it it doesn't matter that these might be out of sequence. This is picture number 18. It's a radar scope shot. I'm sorry, picture 19, the map, the track map from the 5pm advisories 18. Um, so this is

radar scope shot of Irma. And boy, it

looked pretty fierce. Clear eye on radar, the banding, the eyewall. I mean,

wow. And what I was showing in the the Twitter post, it said, "See the little blue marker at Marathon? That is where my weather station and live camera is located. Long night ahead." Let me see
what time I posted that. Uh 5:24. I
mean, it makes sense cuz the radar scope image is 5:22. Um and then I do finally have a picture here. It's just I posted it much later than I had thought that I would have on Twitter. And uh this will be picture number 20. And that is the weather station that I had just referenced in the previous tweet at Vodka Cut. And yo
can see I think it's it's a pretty ingenious setup. The Pelican case, two
of them. One of them has the pressure sensor. The other one has the battery
and the hotspot and all that. And uh the
little computer that's in there. All everything's in there. And then the mast
is clearly gorilla taped to the vertical
beam of the bridge railing. And I'm
telling you, that thing was freaking solid. I mean, it was it was amazing how
rock solid that was. And what you don't see in the picture is just out of the shot. Just a few feet away is the live cam for what it's worth. All right. All right. So, uh, pressure keeps going
down. It's at 991. Winds are 55. yo
know, while we're trying to work out there in Naples and vicinity. Um, so

let's see. Uh, I get Marco running and

we have now Bickl, Vodka, Cut, and Marco

Island. So, we have three cameras up and running and I had five total that I could have brought online. Okay, so Marco Island's up and running. That gives us three that are now live at a pretty good, you know, drop in breadcrumbs if you think about that analogy from Miami Bickl down to Vodka,

you know, Marathon basically. And now over to Marco Island. Next, we go up to
Naples and I get that one running. Let's see what time I got that up and running. This is 9:47 um in the evening. All right. So, that
gets running and I am exhausted. We're

done. That's all the cameras I'm going to set up right now because I wanted to save the fifth one for potentially somewhere in Tampa just in case this
thing went west of Tampa and put a surge up there. I wanted to have a fifth camera ready to go somewhere else if needed. So, we got four cameras. We got the weather station going and we did all
we could do. I got a little bit of extra gas from from Carrie. So, the the Tahoe is full again. And I'm going to start back at whatever the full tank would give me. I don't know what it was, 400 and something miles. I don't remember. But that's no longer a concern because he brought all that extra gasoline. So, I'm going to go back across 75
to my hotel, which is now going to be an Embassy Suites near the airport in Miami. And because it was easy, it was easy to get hotel rooms down there. Naples, farther up into Interior Florida, nope. None available. Southeast Florida, no problem cuz everybody left. I mean, people didn't even want to stay at the hotels, I guess. I mean, I was able to get them, you know, and clearly I had one. And uh even in 2017, I believe we
had the digital key and I didn't have to go to the desk, I don't think. But that's neither here nor there. I had a room. I was checked in, good to go through the Hilton app. I was going to stay at this embassy suit near the airport. I go back across. It's late
freaking late at night. It's just bananas how late it is, right? And um it
really was gosh, it's just so taxing. Uh

and I don't know what it is. Couple hours to get back there. I come in and
I'm just spent. I get up to the room. I

believe thinking back now that sometime

during the day, actually, this does make sense now. At some point that Saturday after I set
up Bickl and before I went across 75 to
Naples, I went ahead and checked in at that Embassy Suites and put some stuff in the room just to thin out the Tahoe a little bit. I actually just remembered that. Yes. So, when I got there, I didn't have to bring up a bag. I was just good to go. Go up, maybe do an
update or something. I probably did. And go to bed, like get some sleep because the 10th, September 10th, this is going to be landfall day. And I need to figure
out what am I going to do? Where am I going to be? I'm not going to go down into the core driving around in the Tahoe. That's not what we do. if we can avoid it. And that's what the cams are for. And you know, is this going to get up towards Tampa? I wanted to be ready for that to kind of outrun it the core
if it was going to affect Tampa dramatically. Put a camera there and make sure that I documented that, yo know, with this this fifth live cam. So,
I get back to the room um and let me see

what time my last tweet was. I was talking about Herby, our weather balloon project, a little bit. This was 11:33 p.m. and I went ahead and uh cashed in

after that, right? And uh went to bed.
So, got some sleep and the next day is

going to be Sunday, September 10th, the peak day of hurricane season, and Irma
is coming.

Heat.

All righty, back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway. Continuing getting close to the conclusion here of the Irma saga. Got a little ways to go though. Uh we are up to September 10th,
2017. And I'm going to start off this segment with mentioning a screenshot from our
weather station down at Marathon Vodka Cut. And let's see what time this was. This is the 10th at 2:25 in the morning.
So, it is September 10th and I should have been asleep, but I wasn't. It must have taken a while to get back. But nevertheless, we were up to September 10th. I would eventually get some sleep. But this is a great screenshot to save
because the wind, this is picture number
21, the wind was sustained at 36 with an
instant gust. The highest gust during that minute was 76. So a nice band had
gone through and the weather station probably got a really strong downburst. But uh very important too, the pressure was down to 983.86 86 and we were using
I want to make this clear too ry young animometers and pressure sensors. So

that was uh good stuff. I mean that's the best that money can buy. I really believe so. Um
so here's another screenshot I'll save to. This is important and an interesting tweet with it. Picture number 22 I think. So I said in the post here, this is a few minutes later 2:29 in the morning. I got to go to bed like right.
Um says the pressure on my weather station reads 983 millibars right now.
In the eye of Irma it's 931.
So by the way Irma had strengthened again after leaving Cuba. So we'll get
to that in a minute. That is a 52 mibar
difference over you know 70 miles less
than 70 mi away. And I saved uh or I
posted this on the Twitter and I'll save it for you here as picture number 22. And I put the little distance calculator from the center of the eye of Irma to Marathon. And um it was 67.7 miles. So, you know,

pretty close to 70 and a 51 mibar
difference in pressure. We call that the pressure gradient. And Irma was now moving basically northnorthwest. So, let's get in there and see what the
advisory said. That would be the intermediate advisory cuz Iowa was still up. Winds are back up to 130 mph. So,
it's a category 4 movement northwest at
6. So, it's not moving fast, but it's moving across the very warm waters of the Florida Straits there between Cuba
and the Keys. So, I finally do go to
sleep, which is good. And uh let's see
what time I finally got up here. Right. Um 6:44 a.m. Woo boy. Only a few hours.

That that is so bad for you. It we all know that. I talked about it a lot over these episodes. I mean it is it just it taxes you. Uh you just you just get worn down
gradually worn down and it eventually does catch up with you, let me tell you. All right. And we'll you know we'll address it eventually. um the whole bit of not being in shape
and not taking care of yourself. Yeah. And you do this kind of stuff, it'll catch up with you. And uh we we'll talk about that very seriously in the next season of this podcast series once we get to 2018. But here I am. I'm up again, you know, few hours of sleep. Uh
but I want to stay on top of it. I want to post stuff. I want to keep people informed. you know, I'm not just out there in it, you know, being like I'm
the center of attention. It's our stuff. That's what I'm really hoping you guys have sort of figured out by now. All
these pictures, all these screenshots, very few of them are me standing in the wind, videos of me in the wind or in the
surge or whatever. Very, very seldom. It
is the results of this project and I was
very, very happy with this. It it gave me that extra boost, I think, seeing
that when I got up a few hours later, everything's still running. And boy, was it running. 40 mph, 1 minute average, gusting to 78. The pressure is down to 971. I'll save this screenshot right off of Twitter for you. This is number 23. I mean, really, I remember this. This was remarkable. I was so thrilled that, man, this was
working. And we had the live cam. Uh
I'll save this one for you. This is picture number 24. It's a screenshot
from the live cam. Um and remember these
are the Logitech broadcaster cams and
they were pretty good, you know. Um they're better now all these years later, but everything was running. And uh now we're up to uh Miami near the
airport. This is a video. I'm just going to look at the video, see what time it was. 8:30. uh from my hotel and it's blowing through there. Irma makes landfall that morning uh across the lower keys as a category 3 or four and of course I was up there near the airport. Um more of
these screenshots. I won't save all of them cuz there's a lot. Uh I'll just tell you the time stamps on this. Again, this is September 10th, Sunday up to 8:30 a.m. A lot going on in just that 8:30 uh bottom of the hour. Uh wind is
50 mph, gusting to 74, pressure down to
967. And uh I was really proud to be able to keep sharing that information. So

that was at 8:32 in the morning. Not

long after, at 8:38, this is what I was
just so bummed about. stuff started happening that would begin to give me a little bit of uh humbling, right? Humble pie. I tweeted out at what

time here? 8:38. I just said that. Uh
the following. Our Marathon, Florida weather station and live camera knocked off the air. Perhaps understandable with a category 4 hurricane nearby. And then
I said, for what it's worth, and for the purpose of science, it's worth a lot. The weather data will continue to record internally on the computer. Now that
camera and the weather station are
transmitting data through via you know

through uh Verizon the little hotspot
that's in there and unfortunately

because of Irma's windfield and how intense it was Bickl that was off air

and uh and I still don't know that that
was necessarily the network going down. That could have been something with the battery, but Bickl's off air and we

can't see anything else. It ran all night. Ran for about I can't maybe 20

something hours. It got through early morning, something like that. That's what makes me think that it could have been a network issue because Bickl went down and then not long after
Marathon/vakut went down and they were they don't come
back. That's the thing. So what happened is the terrestrial network Verizon had
issues and you know you can't blame
them. This is a category 4 hurricane and

the infrastructure is fragile. You know,
it is we're humans and you have not just cell towers, but you have the back end and all kinds of there's there's a there's a chain, if you will, and any link in that chain that gets busted, the chain breaks. And our cameras, Bickl first, then vodka cut marathon, off air.
And that was disappointing. It really was. Everybody wanted to see it. I'm promoting it in the app, you know, and now that's not there. Half the cameras are gone. They're not working. They're not gone. They're just not streaming. Might as well have been gone. So, yo
know, I was like, "Well, we still have Marco Island and Naples." And Irma was
headed right for those areas. And I even said that. I said, "Don't worry, we still have plenty of cameras to go up the coast. Marco Island, Naples, and we
shall see." Cuz I wasn't sure where I might put that fifth camera. Remember? So, I'm spending now unfortunately
more time answering people on social media. Why are the cameras down? I got your app. The cameras are says says off air. I mean, the stress I don't need
that. But hey, I was, you know, talking about it and hyping it up and now they're off air. They are not performing and they do not come back. the Ustream broadcaster, the Logitech broadcaster,
I think it had a tolerance of three or four minutes. And what would happen is when it's streaming, there'd be this green glowing looking cloud thing on the
top of the device, solid, that it's
going. Green means on air. You're good. And then flashing red, it's trying to
connect. And then when it's solid red,
it is not connected and it's not going to try any longer. And the tolerance, like I said, might have been 5 minutes. And that was it. So if the network goes down, if the hotspot turns off, anything happens and the camera cannot talk to the network, you had about 5 minutes and then it would give up and it wouldn't keep trying. So yes, I I feel the stress coming back,
but I was hopeful. The core is headed
for Marco Island next. Uh, so I stayed

at my hotel just for a little bit longer. This is now 10:30 and I was
streaming live from there from that other camera. Just put it up on the balcony or whatnot and that was about it. And then I said, um, and it's time
to go. I'm going to go ahead and leave and try to get up 95. I'm going to go over through Miami to 95. That should be easy. you know, minus the big bands coming through. And I'm going to go up to um
the turnpike, which is no, you know, no tolls, whatever. There shouldn't be anybody out there either. And I was going to try to make my way up to Tampa or maybe Lakeland. I just I wanted to leaprog and get out in front of this thing. And it was going to weaken after landfall. And I thought, all right, we can still get in the core. Carrie and Todd and myself. Carry Todd will be in in Car's truck and we can get in the core of this thing, the eye, what's left of it somewhere, either Tampa or just
inland, maybe Bradenton, where Jeff Cisk
was, where Todd and and Carrie were staying. Um, and of course Jeff was relaying information to uh or maybe
inland. We, you know, Arcadia, I don't know, like somewhere inland, Pontagorta, who knows, right? Like that was the idea, but I needed to get out in front of it. So, I'm getting a little low on
gas now. I'm a little over half a tank as I recall. And it's time to leave the hotel. So, I depart the embassy suit, which was now leaking from the interior roof down into that atrium. Um, and I remember as I was packing up my stuff to get out of there, lots and lots of media was there, national media, those big Suburbans, and they always roll in with these very expensive SUVs. It looks like Secret Service or something, these big media outlets. And I was loading up the Tahoe. It was rainy and windy. And now there are evacuees in the lobby and all
out in the restaurant area, that atrium area in the middle of the embassy suites. People have kids, they have pets. It people are crying. It was very
stressful. I could I could feel the stress on their faces because they weren't sure what they were going to return to. They've probably been at this for several days. They're tired. They're running out of money. I mean, it is it's a very stressful thing. Like, no doubt.
So, I kind of passed through all that. It's like I could see the angst on these people's faces and just the media's around and they got a job to do and there's cameras everywhere. There's a spectacle. Might have even been a couple of stormchaser vehicles there. Um,

so I leave and I'm going to go through
downtown or whatnot, however you get to I 95 from the airport. I did that and
I'm going along and I'm texting with Taylor and he's at the hurricane center in the storm surge unit and Marco Island
is now just like minutes away from the eyewall

coming over Marco. And I said, if you're using our app, Hurricane Impact, yo need to check out what's going on in Marco Island on our live camera. I posted that on Twitter at 11:03 a.m. and

the core is approaching. And uh then I
posted uh at 12:43 p.m. It's it's almost

there. Uh and I posted a uh a picture

screenshot right off the camera. This is picture number 25. And the water is blowing out of Cacamus.
It's uh you know cuz it's offshore wind.
But man, it's coming. And I stopped uh
in Fort Lauderdale and did just a little
uh brief thing with Mike Watkins. He had 5 gallons of gas. So I put that in the Tahoe to get my level up a little bit more. We did a quick update, posted that, and then I needed to go. I said brief video discussion featuring our longtime friend and colleague Mike Watkins from Oakland Park. I mean, not quite Fort Lauderdale, but you get the idea. This is at 108.
And people are asking about Naples. I
said, "Man, I got a really bad feeling about Naples, cuz it looked like the core was going to come in and just put 10 to 15 ft of surge in Naples." And um
so we now get up to
uh and this is Here we go. Uh we get up
to What time is this? uh 1:41 p.m. I

have left uh Oakland Park, Fort
Lauderdale area roughly, and I'm going to cut across uh on the turnpike diagonal, you know, northwest towards Lakeland basically.
And that would get me to I4 and uh I
could either go to Tampa if this is going to go up there. I could assess what I needed to do. Okay. So, let me save this screenshot for you because this is where we get into some very important heavyduty,
you know, uh, disappointment. All right.
Just to be frank about it. You'll see. You'll hear some texting back and forth
with Taylor at the National Hurricane Center. This is an historic moment for
the project. It has been 12 years since
Katrina when I first came up with this idea. The first person to ever stream live like this on the internet. And here
we are. We know the Katrina story. It was a big loss. Close but no cigar. All

the stuff related to that. Ike in 2008
was a little bit of a redemption. We've had some, you know, Sandy was okay, yo know, but this was going to be now certainly Hermine in 2016 that was a big deal, but this would be the pinnacle if I can pull this off and we capture in the daylight the right front quadrant of
a category 3 now hurricane rolling in this massive surge that would come in rapidly at Marco Island live. This would do it.
This would be the moment. and call your counties watching it at their emergency management department. They're watching it on the screen in the operation center
at the National Hurricane Center. That's like having your stuff on in the situation room at the White House in my opinion. That's how big this was to the
project. And I was just like, "Please
hold on. Please hold on." And I'm driving up that turnpike. There's nobody else out there. It's blinding rain,
blistering, blasting against the Tahoe, whipping things around, you because we're in the outer bands, you know, the the Irma's up there, right? And I was

ready, ready, ready, ready. And um I

said, "The biggest test of our project and its history is happening right now, Marco Island, as the eyewall of Irma
passes over." So, I'm going to save these two images for you. This was at 228. What an amazing image this was. It's
like, and I'll get to a a very, you'll be able to understand this better when I when I put a sports analogy to it. So pictures uh 27 and 28
are the radar scope shot of the eyewall,
the very outer part of the eyewall
very much intact on the north and northeast side with a ton of lightning in there just scraping in there.
Everglades City to the east, mainland,

uh, Monroe, rural Collier, you got I75
that goes out of Naples, you got 41 down there, and then this eyewall with very intense wind is just now encroaching

Marco Island where we have a live camera
and I'm on the Weather Channel talking about it. This is the moment. This is like, you know, a football game and the
guy is going to do the field goal to win the game. You know, it's it's the basketball game where the dude has to make or the WNBA, the woman has to make the shot, whatever you want. You know, a putt in golf, whatever, any sports analogy, where it's all on the line. This is that moment.
And we are just minutes away. the
anticipation, the weather channel showing it, the hurricane center watching it, texting Taylor, who is on
the storm surge unit. This was all the marbles, as my father would say, this was it. And all of a sudden, as I'm
driving, watching this, I'm watching it on the phone. And yes, it is possible to
do that. You just drive really slow. And
the worst thing that would happen is I might run off the road and I get swamped. Okay? And I that's fine. I don't want you to, hey, you can't be doing that. You know, sometimes you can. All right. I'm I'm a believer in that. And I was doing it. And uh texting like again that just the tension was building. It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. And then all of a sudden,
I'm watching it like on the phone and it
just goes to the Ustream. It's got this
little screen like a It's an image probably and it says off air. It's just like raging like it's coming the and it goes off air and my heart sank like yo

watched the person miss the field goal

just to the right. The person misses the free throw attempt
just off to the right of the rim or whatever. They missed the putt an inch to the left. You can just go on and on and on, right? And Taylor, I texted him.

I said, camera just went off air. He responded all caps with an exclamation point,
And I was just, oh, it was like it was I

could feel the pain of that in my gut. And I knew that there was a 5minute window and he said, "Uh, is it going to come back on?" And I said, "It's got about 5 minutes to recover." And he and then this is what was really painful. And folks, a pivotal

moment in the history of this project, he says, he poses this question to me,
but it's still recording internally, right? And I said, "No, it has to be streaming
to record into the cloud." And again, he said, "Oh, man. At least he didn't hit me with another, you know, four-letter word. I can't blame him. I said the same
thing." I think, "Shit." So, I said,
"No." He's like, "Oh, God." And it was I

felt like I was going to cry. Like, I really did. It was such a failure that

it's gone and you know the minutes ticked by and the window closed that it's not going to recover and that was the end of it. All we had left was
Naples. So I tweeted
it was so painful at 3:08 p.m. Uh Marco

Island got knocked off the air right as the eye was about to pass over. We still
have a cam in Naples. here is hoping. But man, it was very hard to post that.
I really did feel beaten like what am I
going to do? This isn't going to work.
You know, I can't I mean, we're recording data down at Vodka Cut and and Marathon and data is absolutely important, but I introduced the world to live video during
hurricanes from either a vehicle or remote boxes or both. you know in 2005 12 years earlier

you would think that after 12 years we had mastered this but I also felt it's

not your fault there's nothing you can do we do not have Starlink like we do

now in 2025 when I'm recording this we
don't have yet a backup plan a recording

system because up to this point, the live stuff has worked really, really well. And yet, this was such a punch in

the gut. It was deflating. I felt depressed. Just instant sadness. I mean,
it really was. So, I posted that. I'll read it again. Marco Island got off got
knocked off the air right as the eye was about to pass over. We still have a cam in Naples. here is hoping my good friend
from many years earlier Tim Bruno who is
now in the army or was in the army I don't I can't remember the exact timeline in his life but he had you know deployed in Iraq and done great work for the country and meteorological stuff with warfare and learned weather balloon stuff. I mean just this guy was involved with us since he was a teenager and there he was. This is what I love about this community and our friends that are out there. They got your back, right? I posted that and he could tell, you know,
ah man, that's got to really hurt. And he said, "We're going to have to figure something out to keep the comms up, even if for another hour or two." H
And uh I was like, "Yeah, that or we're

going to have to use a GoPro. We're going to have to use some I don't know. We're going to have to use a GoPro." And I came up, imagine this happening and you go down into a dip, you know, and then just the light bulbs started going off because I'm generally a pretty positive person. I was like, we're going to do a GoPro. I don't know how, but we've got GoPros. We've had those since 2010, 2011, something like that. We're going to use a GoPro. I can't figure it out right now, but it just it was in my mind like boom, GoPro is the answer. We're going to need a live cam and then we're going to need a GoPro to record in case the live cam
doesn't work. So, we still have something. That was the moment that this
presented itself to me, you know, by necessity. So, uh I said the terrestrial network is obviously vulnerable to hurricanes. Maybe with some investment we can look into satellite data. Well, it'd be many years later, but yes, of course. Right. Uh and then lots of uh
you know people responding and some were negative and you know that hurts. Many were positive all kinds of advice and
you know ideas etc. And um you know I

took it all in as as bet as best I could. Um and I said uh to to somebody
they said something negative and I said yes the hurricane beat me you know. Uh,
but you know there was positives, right? Zack, my friend Zack Fidella, he's keeping up the videos for me out there, the video blogs and putting them on the website. So, that was helpful. And we
still had Naples. And Naples is a really

expensive place. Lots and lots of money
down there. And uh just it's it's a big

deal. It is. And man, I was like, "All right, we got that camera down there and it's looking from west to east, straight down one of these streets at some really nice properties. Got the palm trees in the shot. We had set that up the night before and it's going to, you know, it's got the freshest batteries. It's in Naples. Like hopefully the infrastructure there is better." Yo know, I could understand uh Vodka Cut
Marathon. I didn't really understand Bickl. Why did that go out? And even today, all these years later, there's no
definitive reason why Bickl went out. I don't know. There's no telling. It could have been the network and that five minutes went by. The camera just didn't recover. Fine. That's the most logical conclusion. Vodka cut. It's out there in the Keys and that's exactly what happened. Major transmission lines got toppled. Communications were cut. Some of the stormchasers that were down there streaming live, they went dead. Everybody like I think Timmer was down there, maybe Jeff Petrayski, all their live feeds, they were gone. They were knocked off the air too. Everybody went radio silent from what I understood. So Misery loves company, right? But Naples,

that's still running. And if I recall,
let me get in here because this is also
I like this expression uber important.
Um I want to find the advisory here. uh
the public advisory for the 10th when
this started happening. All right, so bear with me. Let's look at three o'clock. Um so this is just a position update and
then 3:35. So the center of Hurricane Irma makes landfall at Marco Island at 335.
So it went right over my camera. H yo
know, didn't get to see it. Uh winds were 115. The pressure was at 940.
But I know that at some point I got to find it here. Uh position estimate is
inland just near Naples. I cannot find
where it is. So maybe it's not in any of
these advisories here. So I might not be able to find it for us. But what happened was the National Weather Service in coordination with the hurricane center issued I think like a flash flood emergency because they were expecting within minutes of Irma the core coming

into Naples that you were going to get this rapid rise literally within minutes
of ocean water from the Gulf coming in 10 to 15 ft. This was the moment. So we
went from Vaka Cut, Marco Island gone
and all that disappointment to Okay, we
have one last opportunity here and that was Naples. So I'm going to so uh save this picture for you. This was 4:40 p.m.
and this is in Naples, Florida from the cam that's sitting there. Come on, save image. Thank you. Picture number 29.

And uh man, this was just rocking. I

mean, it really was screaming through there. It picked up quickly. It was blasting that. You could see the the white out conditions and little bit of water in the street as you'll notice on the picture. And I was still texting
with uh with Taylor and all of us, the
hurricane center, me, the media, everybody was watching this cam. This is on the Weather Channel. They had that uh flash flood emergency out for this uh just imminent disaster of a massive
surge just rolling in there. We were all
waiting and this camera stayed on and
we're waiting and we're waiting and minutes go by and then the eyewall comes
over looking at radar scope and the
surge really never came and we were all just like what the heck like you know not disappointed like oh man but it was
bewildering where's this surge and I'll
save this to you uh to you for you as well uh it's a Google uh satellite,
whatever, with the exact positioning of this camera. You can see where it was.
It was pretty close to an inlet or a cut or whatever they call them down there. And it was near 2400 Winward Way if yo ever want to look that up. Um and that
surge, we kept waiting for it and it never came. And uh the eye went right

over uh the camera. And uh I'll save
this picture for you as well. Looks like sort of a scary face. I even tweeted that. This is picture number 31. The camera stayed up. And uh it got the
eye. And uh I will save that picture for

you as well. There's the eye. From the camera's point of view, the everything's much still. I mean, it's just a still image, so it's hard to tell, but believe me, it went through the eye. I was total calm. And um I uh was a little bit more

enthused and kind of crawled out of this brief disappointment slashtemporary
depression and I said uh I have worked on this project for the better part of a decade and today it reached its potential technology for the win. Uh yo
know the time lapse is going to be amazing. And then we were waiting to see if that 10-ft surge ever happened. Like

maybe the Oh, here's a great one, by the way. Oh, here we go. It looks like a mill pond. Yeah, that's the eye. Wow. This will be picture number 33. It's just flat. You know, there's no wind. All the palm frrons are just sitting there limp. And um you know,

that was it. Uh we were waiting. The surge never got there. All right. Well,
what what are you going to do? You know, I'm not going to wish it on them. Doesn't matter. But that I don't do that. But we were all definitely befuddled like where is this surge? And what we found out was that
a majority of that surge because of the way the rightfront quadrant came in there uh it was mainly down near Marco
Island and the what is it the land of 10,000 islands or it's just called 10,000 islands or something. It was down there in the mangroves and whatever of mainland Monroe and southern Collier,
you know, like hardly anybody lives there. Uh, and they did get about 8 to
10 feet or something like that. I have to read the TCR, the tropical cyclone report, but that's where the surge ended up being. So, yeah. So, this thing makes
landfall. We're waiting for the surge. Um, and it's just kind of moving up the west coast of Florida. Fort Myers was next

and it's getting towards evening. I continue my trek up towards Orlando. I
stopped in at Eileene Jones place, the Kitty Code, Hurricane, Hurricane HD, right? Hurricane Pro. Uh, she had five gallons of gas for me. We did this little dead drop kind of deal, right? And I was able to, you know, put some more gas in the car, the the Tahoe, and,
you know, get that buffer back up until I met up with Carrie and Todd again at
Lakeland because now it looked like that Irma would stay inland over Florida, basically riding the I75 corridor.
And uh we had catch up with Irma um
somewhere in Lakeland that evening. So stayed I don't know about 30 minutes or so at Eileen Jones place talking with
them got the gas you know just a little refresher you know just trying to get my thoughts and the camera is still going in Naples by the way just the hurricane came and went the camera stayed up and
we're getting towards nightfall and now I've got to meet Todd and Carrie over in Lakeland. Hey, hey, hey.

All right, back with you now. Stories from the hurricane highway. The last segment of this episode, the hurricane Irma saga coming to an end in this segment. So, where are we? Well, we are up to the evening now of Sunday,
September 10th, 2017. Irma has made landfall in southwest Florida and it's now moving just inland
along the west side of the Florida peninsula after sending millions of
people scurrying to save themselves to

keep themselves from having to deal with
the effects of Irma. CJ talked about that in his part of the last episode. I
mean, this was a major major event for Florida. Luckily, as our camera showed

down in Naples, the one out of the four cameras that stayed up the whole time, the really big catastrophic storm surge
did not occur. Not in Naples. Now, there was a fairly substantial storm surge
farther to the south in some of the marshy mangrove areas, mainland Monroe,
farther in south in Collier County, but
not in Naples, not at Marco Island, and
not at Fort Meyers. Um, so that was, yo
know, good obviously. And we'll I'll explain a little bit as best I can before we wrap up this episode why that big surge did not materialize. Now, the Florida Keys certainly had a pretty big surge. They were impacted by category 3,
category 4 conditions, major transmission lines coming down, internet getting cut off down there. That's why our feed from Vodka Cut Marathon went

out. It was not our technology. Our stuff was fine. It's just the terrestrial network. Uh everything, the whole infrastructure was taken out. So,
here we are. We're up to Sunday evening. I have already gone up the uh east side of Florida, cut over via the turnpike,
gotten to Orlando, and now I'm going to go meet Carrie and Todd uh just before nightfall in
Lakeland. And that's along I4 because we feel like

the center of what's left of Irma is
going to come up there and still be rather intact. Uh probably category 1
conditions. Yeah, we were expecting 90 100 mph, maybe cat 2, you know, we'll
see. Um but certainly nothing that we couldn't handle. You know, we were going to try to get some observations.
uh me in the original Chevy Tahoe with the animometer on top and the little readout on the dashboard, we were going to be able to get wind readings and pressure data. And I
thought this was going to be really important because we were inland and this would be really good data to pass along to the National Hurricane Center and just to document this aspect, this
part, this phase of Irma's
legacy, which is somewhat close here to coming to an end. Now that it's made landfall, it's not going to really get back out over water ever again. And that
will be that. a true devastating legacy
for this major hurricane. Um, so let me

look at the Twitter timeline and see what time this was. I posted something about it um on Twitter. I said we will
await Irma. It is 75 mi away from us
now. The plan is to get wind speed and gust readings. And the gusts are very important because those can be very short-lived. They can be five 10 seconds. I mean, when there you yo don't 10 seconds is a long time when
something really scary is happening. We've been in it before. I've been in it. My partners that that helped me with this over the years, we try not to do it as much anymore because we have these cameras and weather sensors that we put out there. And there's really no reason for us to put ourselves in harm's way. But if you're out in the open, the wind itself, just regular blowing wind, 90,
100 miles an hour, even 120,
probably isn't going to hurt you. It might blow you over, you know, and depending on your physical situation, how you are health-wise. It could scare you. You could get injured, sure, but like the wind doesn't really hurt yo until it gets probably above 150 mph,
maybe. I don't really know, but it's what's in the wind. It's debris, stuff falling, stuff flying through the air. That makes sense, right? So, we're not too worried about it. We're going to be somewhere out in the open. We got big,
heavy SUVs or trucks, and we know what
we're doing. You know, I'm not doing this haphazardly, that's for sure. So,
uh, the plan is to be up there on four, I4 in Lakeland, and we can move

laterally. I4 down there goes basically

southwest to northeast. Um, it's not
straight across. It's not straight west to east. Uh, so it kind of cuts diagonal. That's that's that's the word. It's diagonal basically. Uh, from Tampa
over to Orlando. And then of course it cuts up to Daytona Beach from there. And so we can move laterally on I4 as
needed. But we felt pretty good about Lakeland. And um so the center what's
left of the core uh this shrimp curled
up shape. I'll save this picture for you. Uh picture number 34.
It's down over um southwest Florida still just east of um Cape Coral. maybe
east northeast of there um east of Port
Charlotte. Still has a pretty good core with it. So, I'll save this image real quick for you. It's a radar scope screenshot. And this is at 8:13 p.m.

Eastern time. And there we were. And I like that I did this. Radar scope has this little mileage thing. And um I kind
of guesstimated the eyewall, what was
left of it, cuz it's filling in. Once this thing makes landfall, any hurricane once they make landfall, the center is disrupted and the pressure starts to fill in the center pretty quickly and
everything just starts to collapse and become much less organized and depending
on the forward motion and the exact
situation. Certainly Michael in 2018, which we'll we'll get to in the next season, um that was a little different.
And they're not all the same, but usually, especially when uh they're already kind of falling apart and interacting with a trough or something, they start to fill in pretty quickly. And Irma was was doing that. But yeah, if you can take a look at this picture number 34, we were 74 75 miles away,

something like that. And uh we were ready, you know, that was going to be the final stand, if you will, between us
and Irma. So, um, Carrie brought a bunch
of gas and I filled up the Tahoe all the
way. Uh, or maybe five extra. I don't remember exactly. I think actually we did it the next morning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about that. I remember now. My old phrase, right? Remembered I
remembered later. Um, yeah, we'll get to that because he did bring plenty of gas. Um, and uh, so uh, we were fine in that
regard. But what's interesting is we stopped at a gas station at one of the interchanges in Lakeland um along four and just hung out under
the canopy. There was no gas available
nowhere. I mean Florida was out. It
really was. I mean I'm not saying 100% I
can't verify that but pretty much anywhere you went there was no gas. people had I mean you're talking millions of people left and they took the gas with them literally. Yeah. They filled up their tanks and then they filled up a couple of you know gas canisters or whatnot. And so we just hung out and we had some snacks and just chilling out and we're waiting and letting the time go by and I I do want to see real quick how fast Irma was moving at this point. 8:00 p.m. In fact,
I'll save this image as well. This will be number 35. Um it is the track map from the hurricane center based on the advisory. So it was moving north at 14 and it was
a category 2 at this point. 105 mph sustained wind and you know that's that's getting it 105 is you know
nothing to mess with right. Uh and that is the 8 p.m. intermediate advisory. So
it's moving north at uh 14. So let's
just round it up and call it 15. Okay,
so in 10 hours it's going to be 150 mi
further up. Half of that is 75. So we
still have roughly 5 hours. It's going

to accelerate. So 4 and 1/2 hours or so,
something like that, maybe 4 hours that it's going to be until it reaches us in Lakeland. So it's going to be after midnight. So I mean, we were tired. I know Carrie and Todd were. I was more tired honestly
because I was you know I had been going on this thing since the end of August it felt like. And uh but you know we did we
did what we could. We um chatted and
waited and like I said we had some food and um just hung out and you know
documented the pressure readings and social media post and so forth. And I think one of them here um I was trying to see when I posted something about the cameras uh especially the one in um Naples. Um

maybe that's much later on. I'm just scrolling up the Twitter timeline here. I do want to keep this as much in chronological order as I can. All right,
so I said we're hanging out in Lakeland. Um peak wind gust on the Tahoe so far.

that was 805. So again, it's still that
um it that's still the uh that same time

frame that we really got started, right? Um so let's move up a little bit more. I'm just looking through, you know, how this works. 8:41 p.m. There was some
video that I posted on Twitter and just looking at the wind speeds in the video. 32, 30, 27. It's instant on the left
side of this little wind readout that we have or had. Um, you get the instant
wind reading up on the upper left and then the peak gust since the moment that I reset the peak gust and I can reset that whenever I want. The peak gust was 46 mph. So, we're we're getting into those outer bands and Irma's getting closer and we're doing pressure readings. And this is pretty cool. This is um this next tweet that I put up. Uh
this is basically at the top of the hour of 900 p.m. And we had gone over the
past hour the pressure 985 983 981

as examples. Um and I'll just save the
last one here, the 981 for you. Uh and
this is literally just a picture. Picture number 35 here. It's a photograph. I'm sorry. This is number 36. There we go. Um, that's just a

picture that I took of the readout off of uh Car's Kestrel. It's a little handheld. So, you've got the drop sensors that are that don't have an animometer and they do pressure, dupoint, humidity, that kind of thing. Temperature, obviously. And then yo have these handheld Kestrels that have a little I think they're like the 5000 or something. I've got one, of course, and I've got a bunch of the drop sensors, too. Um, but the uh the nicer Kestrel,
the little uh I think it's the 5,000 or whatever, has a an LCD readout and yo
can see um what the what the pressure is and or whatever the parameters are. And so it was nice. It was back lit. Yo could take pictures and voila, we could share that on social media. So we did cuz I'm I'm just I'm a weather geek, man. I I want to know this stuff. I want to know the pressure. It's just so neat to me. It's like measuring the vitals. I
mean, that's exactly what it is. And again, I'm going to emphasize this. I have the privilege of being able to do this. We tracked this thing since it was a tropical disturbance over Africa, an
impulse. Models are starting to pick up on it. At the end of August, I'm still in Houston dealing with Harvey when we
saw the genesis possibilities of this system. And here I am a few hours from

being in the center of it. I could do it a thousand times. I should be so lucky,
right? And I will never get tired of it. It's the It's a privilege of these massive engines of weather. Yo
understand? And so to me, it's an honor.
It really is. And just to have that, to know I measured the pressure in this
thing, this big giant wind machine that
has caused so much stress and anxiety
and damage, yet it is a marvel of

nature. I mean, it is. We cannot deny that, you know, and there's no reason to be angry at these hurricanes. They're they're not living things. There's no evil. They just are. All right? and
we're just in their way. It's just that's how it is. So for me to be able to measure any aspects of them, the
meteorology here, these stats, the pressure in the wind, very important, but also of course is my legacy of being
able to record what they do, especially with the remote cams, the visual side of
it, you know, where you can see the impacts. That's important. So there yo
go. Little rant for you or whatever. All right, so moving on along. Uh, just had
a peak gust of 57 miles per hour in Lakeland, Florida, right on top of I4. Carrie and I found this nice overpass
um out there. Todd, too, I don't want to leave Todd out. He was sitting in there with with Carrie and his truck. Uh, and
that was at 9:04. So, we're getting closer and closer to this thing coming on in there. And I said, "Brace yourselves. A giant shrimp is headed this way. Uh seriously though, there will be some violent winds in that curly queue. Uh so the center is west of uh

Sebring, Florida, and it's crawling right up like what is that 17 or something. Uh Barto is about 90 minutes

from this thing at this point. This thing the core. And I'll save this picture. What are we up to? Number 37. And this is 10:12 p.m. I think it is
that the radar scope showed. Yep. And I
mean it was still a formidable uh Wow. And just the rain out in front of it, those bands. And if you look at the radar scope image, you can see these these, you know, sharp areas of reflectivity, those bands. Anytime those would come across as man, things would just ramp up. You see the power flicker from time to time and so forth. Then I'm
going to save this one for you, too. This is like 10 uh 10:24 p.m. Picture

number 38. A remarkable radar image.
It's real close to um what is that? Zulo

Springs or however you say it near uh
south just southeast of Wula and Bowling
Green. Just look at the image. You'll see. Uh, I circled it, you know, when I
did the screenshot from Radar Scope. There's a little pink in there. So, there was just enough convergence and upward motion. There's reds and oranges
and pink. And pink usually denotes solid
or hail. And so, this thing had to just
have been ripping and maybe even some
hail, a loft. Unbelievable. I mean, Zulo

Springs, however you say it, they probably just were just blasted. And I'm honestly, I was glad I wasn't there cuz it's dark and that's down more in the rural areas of Florida. It's not quite
Lakeland where it's a bigger city and whatever. Uh, I just couldn't do that. And I even said that, can you imagine the kind of wind that is ripping through there right now? All right. So, we move along and thinking, you know, it's going to be in the Lakeland area midnight to 1:00 a.m. Um, oh, here we go. This is
good. I actually did take a picture so I can save this for you. I said, "Say hello to Wendy Mc Smiley face. He is now
live via our Ustream feed in our app."
Uh, talking about that app again, but this is it's a picture right off of the Ustream. I don't remember what I did to do this, but I was letting people just watch the animometer on Ustream the readout. Anyway, this is picture number 39 that I have saved for you. And yo
can see the instant wind is 35, the peak
gust is 57. All right. So we move along

and um finally it does come over us and

we get you know 80 something mile hour

70s 80s something like that. Trying to see here uh 62 mph at 11:47. I'll save

this as well. These are good to save for you. I know it's overwhelming. Got 40 pictures so far with this being picture number 40. But look at that instant wind reading of 48 with a gust of 62. That's 11:47 p.m. Um the air temperature going

up. Uh it's like in the upper 70s. 76.3°

that warm core coming in. Um moving on

along. It's almost here. And I literally said that on the tweet. I'll save this one for you as well. This is 12:28 a.m.
And you know, luckily for us, Irma was accelerating. Picture 41. Check it out.
The eyewall, what's left of it, is just about to where we are. The worst of the
wind and whatnot was honestly over south

of I4 and then more to the east of us.

But I didn't want to drive on I4 in that
kind of wind and rain. That's a big no no. And um
uh we got like let's see what was it. I
know I saved some of them in here. Yep. 68 mph at 1237.
Um and then finally here's one at 70.
Says peak wind gust of 70 mph in Lakeland. The power is still on all
around and it flickered a little bit but the power definitely still stayed on. So I'm going to save this picture for you. This is a good one. Picture number 42.
And there it is. Uh 27 gusting to 70. Um

and then somebody says, "I heard you on the weather channel, Mark." I must have done a phoner with the weather channel during all of this. So the worst pass
through after about 30 minutes or so.
And um I think our peak gust was like 76

or something like that. I'm trying to see if there was any indication of that. And so we're done. Irma comes over us.
It's dry now. Uh the eye has filled in.
So it's kind of windy in there. That pressure rising. Everything's flowing in and it's like a big comma shape now and it's moving up through Florida into the southeast with this huge feeder band
moving into the southeast coast. uh Charleston in particular, they were going to have some some uh some substantial flooding uh come uh Monday uh the 11th of
September. Uh Jacksonville, Florida as well with that easterly flow uh just
perpendicular to the coast. So that's you know elsewhere we're done and we go on up to Orlando. I had a room booked
for us, uh, two different rooms, one for me and one for Carrie and Todd to share.
And, um, that was at the Hilton Garden
Inn near Universal Studios. And I

remember when we got there, the the rain had quit cuz all the precept Shield, as
we call it, had moved north. Um, so the
rain had quit, but man, the wind was just howling. really howling in there and uh I don't
know probably 55 60 mph and again

believe me that's plenty. Most people don't realize it does not take much wind to cause problems and so we tend to
overestimate what we're seeing. You see what you think is 80 or 90 mph, it's really maybe 60. It's just it doesn't
doesn't take that much, believe me. Especially on the the human landscape and and trees and everything too, for that matter, the natural landscape. So,
um we we get to the hotel. Uh it was uh

wet cuz they had had all kinds of wind driven rain. Power was still on though.
And uh we parked in the parking lot and walked in. It was soggy. Carpet was wet. There's people in the lobby. you know, it it was busy. Uh I think that we were
on the first floor, but I can't remember for sure. Might have been on the second. That part really doesn't matter. But um I remember it was howling like you could hear the wind coming in through elevator
shaft, uh stairwell, crack, anything. Anywhere the wind would come in, it was that whistling, howling sound. Very spooky, very eerie. But luckily the power was on and it sounded like this
growling deal. Um so got to bed about

3:00 a.m. and we got up uh in the

morning and our good friend that lives

close by, Mike Cornelius, came over. He

walked over from where he lives near Universal and hung out with us a little bit. Um, the wind had calmed down. Finally, the sun was out. It was muggy and just, you know, it's still heart of
hurricane season. It's literally the peak time. And we went to put gas in uh

the Tahoe. And this is what was the funny part. I don't remember how we did it, but just like for some reason, you know, several
ounces of it spilled. And you know how gasoline is, it gets on you. I think Mike was trying to help and it's there's something about gasoline. The viscosity of it of it is different
than water or milk or tea or something.

I swear it's just so much easier to spill. And it just is. And he was trying

to help cuz those things those five gallon jugs are heavy. And uh I remember it spilled and it was just like gh it was on our shoes. It was a challenge,
but um we gassed up and uh drove around

a little bit, took a few pictures. Um
now, I was talking about Jacksonville. Some people shared with me images from Jacksonville, Florida of the extreme flooding down there that morning from the St. John's. Uh the river piled the
water in there off the Atlantic. Um
Charleston, the same thing up in uh Charleston Harbor uh down at the battery. Um here's a picture I'll show you uh and save it for you. We're now up to September the 11th. Of course, this is 2:00 in the afternoon trying to get out of Orlando and start making my way back home. Picture 43 for you. Hanging
power line and I or uh power line and uh

stoplight. Sorry. I said, "Road hazards in the Orlando area." So, that's the thing. You survived the hurricane, you know, whether you're us or you are you, anybody that's been through it and
you stayed where the hurricane hits or whatever the case may be, you might be coming back. And this is why re-entry is such a an important part of the
hurricane process. We're tired. We're stressed. We've been through a lot. And these things are hanging down. You're not used to that. I'm used to it, but I can still be surprised. You You're going along, you get comfortable, all the roads seem to be good. All of a sudden, there's this one area, maybe there's a little bit stronger wind and there's one of these stop lightss hanging down just about windshield level. You could really have a bad day or power cables, yo
know, parts of how power lines are held up, you know, not even the electrified line itself, you know, the cables that keep the the the poles up, whatever. There's just hazards. And that goes for not just us, but the public as well.
People that stayed and they're venturing out. It's a real problem. Then you have the four-way stop situation at an intersection where these lights aren't working. Do people understand how that goes? You know, so yeah, finally we're

able to get out and um Carrie and Todd
are going to make their way eventually back to Houston. and I was going to try
to get up into Georgia um via 75.

I honestly don't remember why I didn't
just go up 95 and go on to North
Carolina. I don't know. I think I wanted to document the damage up 75 into

Georgia and then the return flow
evacuation traffic. I think that's part of it. And my hotel I had booked was in

Augusta, uh, Georgia. Um, I think maybe

it was No, it was some Sorry, it was Conurs. It ended up being Augusta or somewhere near there. We'll get to that. Um, yes, my room was initially in Conjur, Georgia. Um, I think a big part of it too was,
you know, I was leaving at like 3:00 in the afternoon and very, very tired and I

knew I wasn't going to be able to drive all the way back to North Carolina. So, I thought, well, let me at least get into Georgia. I don't know. Whatever my reasoning was, the hotel was a Hampton in Conjur, Georgia. So, log that somewhere. That's important to remember. So, I'm heading north on the turnpike.
Carrie is nearby as well. I finally get
back to 75 and I'm not kidding folks.
Hundreds of thousands of cars, trucks,
relief vehicles, you name it. Multi-county, multi-state responses streaming down 75 to the south with a

handful of cars going north. It is the most bizarre aspect. It really is. the
evacuation and then the return. I see
that. I see both when I go to these missions. If I'm there long enough, I do see the return, the return evacuation traffic. And I did a time lapse of it. It was incredible. Put it on Twitter.
Um, I mean, just remarkable all these people coming back. And as CJ talked about in his his part there of the last episode, there's no food, there's no gas, people are tired, they're stressed, they don't Some of them are trying to get back to areas where Irma are directly impacted. It is not a fun thing. Nobody ever said it was, but I'm telling you, believe me, it is not. It is grueling and taxing on
people, and you know, I get to go home.
And luckily, I don't have to deal in Wilmington. At least not yet. Direct hits from hurricanes to this magnitude.
At least, as I said, not yet. We Well,
that'll change once we get to 2018 in that season, and that's coming up in season 6 of this podcast series. But I
digress. Um, let's move on. So, traffic
among traffic among traffic. It's just it's nuts. And then it's raining again, you know, on the traffic. And it's just like a parking lot as as far as the eye
could all the way up to the Georgia border on 75. And I would stop at
interchanges. I had plenty of gas cuz
not only did I have a full tank, but I brought a couple of 5gallon cans with me. So I was fine. I was going to get into Georgia. And that's exactly what I did. I get up into southern Georgia,
eventually into central Georgia, uh,

near Atlanta. And I'm gonna save this pic. It's just a one-word tweet. Irrma.

What a great picture. This was 6:34 p.m.
And it's the National Weather Service like radar composite of the whole southeast. And you can see Irma just this huge spiral commshaped deal. And look at that
band. If you look at the image again, this is picture. What the heck did I say? It has number 44.
Look at that band in Charleston feeding right into Charleston. And even in southeast North Carolina, it was I mean the Carolinas were soaked. Georgia, Alabama, and far as far west as Mississippi got in the preip. This was a
wide reaching catastrophic hurricane
from the Caribbean. all of our friends down there and then up into Florida and the the entire Southeast US. So on I go, you know, the the traffic
jam of just epic proportions
uh into Georgia deep. And I remember I stopped at a couple places trying to find

somewhere to eat and it's just it wasn't

happening. Uh not even close. Um, and uh

this is I'm just keeping my uh Yeah. So, by the way, so this is the 11th. I'm just looking through my timeline here. We're almost done. The episode's about to wrap up. So, I'm just figuring out where things go and how I'm going to finish this. Um, so I get on up to, this
is why I said to remember Conurs. I get up to Conurs and Conurs is east of Atlanta on I20 and I get to Conurs and

they don't have power and I'm driving in there. It's just dark. I'm like, "Wait, what?" And Irma had gone up into there
and uh wrecked it. I think parts of
Atlanta had no power. I don't remember the amount of people, but it it was like it was really spooky. They're like, "This is hundreds of miles inland." And of course, I should have known. Of course, they're not going to have power. But here's what spooked me. Okay, this is where again I told you to remember the Hampton Inn and and Conurs. I pull
in. I've been there before a couple times in my travels. And there's two or
three police cars with their blue lights on in front of the Hampton. One of them was up under the little portico thing. And I just had this really bad feeling. And I'm like, "Nope, I'm not going to stay there." They got lights. They didn't have their sirens on, but like I just didn't have a good feeling. Like, h, you know, maybe like why? Why? And I
didn't want to go ask and just poke around. I was like, "Forget it. I'm not going to stay there." So, I flew the drone uh to just show how cuz there was

some emergency lights on in some of these areas. Just like showing the darkness from the drone. I remember I put it up about 100 ft and there was just a few lights on again from generators or something and um it wasn't
very effective but I remember doing that. Remember the Phantom 2 you could launch it no matter what. Um now they
have like flight restrictions that are built in and there's all kinds of regulations. But um I went on I don't

remember who helped me but somebody helped me locate a room either near

Augusta or Aken South Carolina. It was a Hilton Garden in and I had to drive another several bunch of hours and I did I made it uh to to the Hilton Garden in
I think it was Aken. Um and oh yeah I
even referenced the uh drone on Twitter.
I said, "Aerial video showing the power outage in portions of Conjurs, Georgia."
Uh, hopefully it's turned out the way that I had envisioned. Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of hard because it was dark, but you know, whatever. I was giving it a try. Um,
so I finally got to the Hilton Garden in
and uh I got to uh to sleep. Who knows

when I I texted or texted I posted here.
People were asking me like, "Where are you?" Whatever. I said I'm driving on I 20 now between Atlanta and Augusta and it's pitch dark out here. I'm talking cave dark and this is 1 minute to midnight uh from the 11th into the 12th
and then we get into the 12th and I finally get there get some good sleep and I got to find it cuz it's the obligatory picture of um

uh the south of the border, right? Um

yeah. So I finally I get up. I remember I had I did some updates uh sent some
video to the weather channel. I worked in the lobby of that Hilton Garden in that morning of the 12th. Uh even after
checkout, I just hung out in the lobby doing some work using their Wi-Fi. And
finally uh 20 connects to 95 at
Florence. And even at the North Carolina South Carolina border, I 95 near the
North Carolina South Carolina border. I said traffic going as far as the eye can
see. All the people coming back south.
This was a monumental event. It really
was. Um, and let me save this picture before I forget. I said on Twitter, "Now I know I'm close to home. What a saga this has been. Important video coming up tomorrow. You're going to want to see it." And it was the Naples video. I had
shared it with the weather channel and then I was going to put it on social media and elsewhere the next day on the 13th or whatever. Uh so let me save this picture. The like I said the obligatory south of the border picture number 45.
Perfect. Um and I was almost home and
let's see if that was just about it. It was uh one more picture for you because
this is also very very important. the last of the stuff related to Irma directly. Um, the data that was

streaming out from the weather station

before it went offline was all sitting
on our server. So, up to the point that
the weather station stopped transmitting because the internet went down down at Vodka Cut, uh, our good friend Jason, who has programmed a lot of stuff for the site over the years, helped to develop the software to get all this stuff online. Anyway, the the weather data, he went into the server, grabbed the data that we had, and made a nice plot. So, this will be the last photo. photo number 46.
The green line, you can see the pressure on the 9th of September and then it plummets down below 970. So, it's in
like 965, something like that. And uh
the wind speeds got got up there above 80 and then it went out, you know, cuz
we lost the uh the internet connectivity because of the freaking core of a cat 4
hurricane or whatever it was at at, yo know, landfall down there in the Keys wiped out the infrastructure. So, a couple things before we say goodbye here for this episode. Anyway, why didn't the storm surge happen in Naples? basically
because the right front quadrant with all of the onshore flow coming into that
little it's not really little but the right angle area of mangrove
uh whatever in mainland Monroe and Cawer
south of Everglades City nobody lives there to speak of lots of alligators and some snakes sure that's where the surge
came in several feet all right it did
not manifest itself self, Marco Island, Naples, elsewhere to any great degree,
you've got to have that onshore flow

where it just piles in
all the way onshore all the time, yo
know, and it just didn't do it. So, they got spared. You've got to have that onshore flow. And that's definitely what happened farther south, but not Naples, not Marco Island, not Fort Meers, as I said. And even the backside as Irma went
through, it was hollowed out. So the
water was just not able to funnel on shore perpendicular as the backside of Irma came through. Just just wasn't enough. So that's the general explanation of it. The surge didn't move
into um the area of Florida that we were most concerned about. So that was good for them. Now, a couple of things that are very important going forward before I finally wrap this up. We had four of these live
cams. Again, I'm going to summarize this because this is huge, huge benchmark
change getting ready to happen because of Irma. The Miami went at Bickl, yo
know, at at Taylor's Place went out probably from internet failure again. just it just wasn't it wasn't up to it I
guess Irma just showed us the weaknesses in the terrestrial network. Um
then Vodka Cut went out Marathon then
Marco which made sense actually if yo think about it as the core progressed towards the peninsula these areas failed
in the back end of uh Verizon and it certainly is not a dig on them. This is a giant hurricane we're talking about. And they've certainly done well since then, and we'll get to that in future episodes. But, um, that's what it was.
These three out of the four cameras that were in great locations failed to transmit because the backend, the internet, you know, in this case, the Verizon network went down. For
whatever reason, in Naples, it did not.
Now, Marco Island, which is still in Crawer County, did. But it's all about, you know, the wind and stuff pulling up T1 lines and back end and back haul.
It's you can't just say the cell site went down. There's much more complexity to it than that. But the bottom line, the live feeds that had worked so well
since 2005 when we first started it
failed me in a very big important hurricane. the one that did stay up Naples. Yes, it was dramatic. Yes, it was a pretty good win, you know, uh but
there was not a giant surge, which great for them, but you know, had there been, you know, you know how that works. Like if it had happened, we would have captured it. It's like, h okay, but what are we going to do going forward? This cannot this cannot stand. We have to
have a backup. So immediately even
during the mission, I think I touched upon this earlier in these two plus hours once Taylor
I had told him that uh that Marco went out and he you know texted back that
four-letter sword. Um it was like that light bulb went off. I'm like we've got to do something with the GoPros. So what I started doing
immediately, remember this is around September 12th. I get home. I immediately started brainstorming with Carrie. We need to use a GoPro as a

backup in a separate box.
But we have to figure out how to get them to run longer than they ah roughly

90 minutes if you're lucky that they
normally run with the stock battery. How do we get them to run longer to where we could fill up a chip? and how big of a chip could we use? That became the

number one issue that I wanted to deal with and solve. I needed to solve that problem immediately. Wasn't going to wait for 2018. We'll do it later. Let's start working on it right now. And by goodness, we
did. and uh when we get to the next episode um which is going to be Maria

and Nate together because they're fairly short relatively you know you'll see like Maria I dealt with Maria on the Outer Banks we'll talk about that obviously it had a big impact down in the Caribbean but I wasn't there so I'm going to bring up Maria in probably the first segment of the next episode and then it's Nate and once we get to Hurricane Nateoo history is made it is we have a roaring

victory. It's just terrific. All right. Well, you made it. You made it through the episode with me and uh we went a
long time and I appreciate it. A lot to to go over and a lot of pictures. I hope you go back at some point if you haven't already. Check those out on Patreon or on Discord. They will be there hopefully forever. All right. Thank you very much for tuning in and thank you for the support of this podcast by your patronage through Patreon. It is a treat and a privilege and just wonderful to be able to make these episodes for you. And with that being said, I am Mark Sutath, the host of Stories from the Hurricane Highway. We'll talk again soon.