it's a category 2 hurricane out here did the Western eye come ashore yes it did it came right across right down over top of us right there there is the hurricane landfall project truck it's all set up strapped down we're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe we are getting into the eye wall of hurricane jeene right now core came in on Shore here along the Southeast coast of these little bullet cams right here
that we will use to record that

surge hello again and welcome to another edition of stories from the hurricane highway I am your host Mark suth great
to have you with me again as we continue our Trek down the fabled hurricane
Highway and uh lots of Adventures await as we start drum roll please there you go a new year 2016 now

um yeah a lot happened in 2016 we're going to get through it all that was the year I started patreon I do believe um
it was the year that we had Hurricane Matthew we had hurricane hermine uh I would work with the Weather Channel again officially after not working with them at all in 2015 no
reason it's just one of those weird things uh Corporate America and big media took 2015 off but 2016 they saw

fit to give me another contract so that was good we'd be working with the Weather Channel again in 16 um we tested
Herby again that year out in Kansas Pratt with myself and Greg Nordstrom and

Carrie and Todd so the four of us went out there to do some testing and uh we had some winter weather we had those Logitech cameras we were adding more and more to our Arsenal uh the Logitech broadcasters that worked on Ustream my YouTube was yeah coming along okay um
you a little bit of more activity on Facebook certainly very active on Twitter we're going to reference Twitter a lot as I like to do uh in this podcast

series because it's so easy to just go to the Twitter advance search punch in Hurricane track and different times and dates and I have a chronological listing of what life was like Wayback win so
let's do that let's start sort of at the beginning of 2016 and then actually
rewind the clock just a hair to the very end of 2015 the last tweet that I put out on
December 31st 2015 apparently I was referencing the JJ Abrams directed Star

Wars episode 7 the force awakens and because I said it's just one of these weird tweets right wishing everyone a happy and safe 2016 exclamation point always remember that's
not how the force works I know thought that was funny I guess I don't know that's all I had and that was my last tweet of 2015 that's not how the force Works must have been one of the lines from the force awakens I don't remember I remember the other movies better episodes four five and six those came out when I was a kid and then episodes 1 2 and three when I was an adult and then all these other one seven eight and nine eh whatever so that was my last tweet of

15 once we got into early 2016 however

marks back on the weather beat and uh cold air had come down into the southeast looked like we might have some snow showers down as far south as the
Outer Banks but as we move through um
the first few days of 2015 it looked
like a low pressure area it was an ocean storm as we call it wasn't purely tropical looked likely to bring some heavy rain and Gusty winds out near Bermuda and um we shall save this I got to make my folder I forgot to make my folder so we'll do it now we will make a folder for uh 2016 to put all these pictures

that I can save and attach to patreon
and Discord so here is the picture it's
an ocean storm so a non-tropical system and um it would affect Bermuda uh

a little bit and then let me get this in here it will go on to become Hurricane

Alex early like a January hurricane I'm
not kidding you remember that that was 2016 so I'd mentioned it on January 7th
and um it still sort of had a hybrid
comma shape to it I'm mentioning that on Twitter and then boom uh on the 7th a
little later on sure enough the Hurricane Center puts out the little yellow area um of uh of interest and let
me see if I can click on this and enlarge it in fact I'll say this as our second picture um see if I can zoom in
and read that it's hard to read it basically it was an extr tropical low and folks it went on to become Hurricane Alex uh not too long after all of this
and let's see if I can find when that happened and it was a January hurricane very very strange to see that and here we go it was a subtropical storm near Bermuda it separated from the front so to speak and it went on to become hurricane Alex um in the North Atlantic there a
subtropical first then a hurricane so forth and so on and it was used up and
so the next name once we got to Hurricane Season assuming nothing else happened before June 1st would be Bonnie
so we already had Alex there wasn't that something I remember that that was that was wild and crazy another thing that happened in 2016 I just noticed this remember Twitter had this thing called Periscope and it was like a way to just kind kind of popup live uh I think it
was vertical a vertical format and it
was pretty popular they had a map and you'd have little Periscope icons that would pop up you click on them and yo could watch school kids in Russia and
people in the Middle East and China and
you know wherever the US uh Florida the up to main La people own street corners
and and shopping malls and it was just this quick popup thing like an UPS scope you know Periscope up or whatever Up Periscope that was the idea and um that yeah that started in in
uh 2016 I guess or it certainly started
catching on and I remember we tried it a little bit but it didn't really serve much purpose for what we were trying to do but yeah I was just reading through here uh there's a screenshot that I posted of somebody I'm going to save this for you too this is January 10th this is so cool cuz you can go see how the world was way back then um this is a
screenshot I did of somebody's Periscope and it's clearly in Russia you see all the Russian on the the little comments or whatever and it just looks like Russia it says meanwhile teleport to Russia real quick just wow that's what they should have call it teleport H Periscope is good cuz it made sense like Up Periscope just kind of pop up yeah check that picture out that I've attached to this episode on patreon and
Discord it looks cold there in Russia doesn't it certainly did so yeah we uh had Alex you know and that went uh on and was a big deal Meandering
around the Atlantic mid January by the
14th uh there's Alex I'll save this this is our fourth picture so far for this episode and um had an eye and everything I mean it was just one of those weird situations where the water temperatures were warm enough and you had enough instability um that you didn't have to have the 80° on the ocean surface to get this thing to be a hurricane it was just one of those oddballs but boy yes look at the picture you see it had an eye a central dense overcast the whole works definitely hurricane on January 14th um 2016 so that's how we start the year

with a hurricane believe it or not and again I had to remember that myself whoa wow really kind of forgot about it everything that's happened since 2016 holy cow it's been a lot I did I forgot all about hurricane Al there in mid January 2016 so we start the year off on
a quite interesting note and then from
there it just gets more interesting and we'll pick that up right after the

break all right back with you now stories from the hurricane Highway moving through the month of January
2016 after the early season I mean what

would you call January it's not even the season but we had Alex Hurricane Alex there in January 2016 it was time to focus on more
typical January stuff winter weather and
boy we were going to have a doozy of winter storm in mid January um towards the last third of January I started tweeting about it around the 17th and 18th and um this
storm had quite the signal in the modeling looked like it was going to be a powerful nor Easter uh that would get
its Origins off the Southeast coast run
up the east coast of the us bringing
potential major storm surge flooding to
New Jersey and uh maybe up into Long Island New York along Long Island Sound and remember the Weather Channel starting in 2012 or 2013 somewhere around there um as a marketing thing
began naming winter storms it's not an official US Government thing and so the name of this winter storm at least according to the weather channel um was Jonas we were already up to the jstorm there in mid January 2016 um and I even joked about it with Matt Lanza you guys know Matt Lanza from the Twitter universe uh he now is a
meteorologist well he was then but he's a meteorologist works for works with uh Space City weather and other things he's down in Houston Texas um a uh dad of two

husband as as his Twitter says here says tweeting at Matt Jonas went out and got himself some corporate sponsors quite literally and if you guys know the movie Twister the original you know what I'm talking about and then the irony there is me talking about winter storm Jonas
went out and got himself some corporate sponsors yeah that would be the weather channel and all the different adverti anyway you you get the dad joke there Matt lza likes dad jokes too by the way he's pretty popular for that so um the

uh talk was okay all this energy is coming in for this big winter storm and
uh it's it's still up over the Pacific off the northwest coast of North America

British Columbia Washington State whatnot and we got to wait for that piece of energy up in the 500 mbar levels of the atmosphere to come in and
get sampled by the upper air balloons
and whatnot and then the models will do better and so we're waiting for all of that to happen and just kind of watching things you know how these things evolve we see it with hurricanes and it's the same thing with these big big winter storms and I was very excited to to go up to the Mid-Atlantic States the
Northeast us and Tackle this um and in
fact I was going to kind of cover it at the time 2016 here would be the largest
Geographic spread that I would cover
with the project a single storm and how
I did that was I had I guess at some
point sent one of our Ustream broadcast

boxes with the uh the Ustream uh broadcaster in it one of our remote cam boxes to the mountains of North Carolina up near Spruce Pine where my mother and father lived at the time I must have sent it up there or taken it up there at some point and left it showed U my father how to turn it on um and whatever

how it worked because I said you know look if you guys get a big winter storm up here which the mountains of North Carolina typically do you know a few times a year it'd be really neat to have live video from your property and that's
exactly what they did my dad turned the camera on and we had a live shot coming
from uh his property I'll get to that in just a few minutes as the storm unfolds here uh going through chronological order in in things but I remember that I remember that was an aspect of it and um and then we had another camera from uh a friend of ours
I keep mentioning him Dan um who has a
house up in Long Island up in baiting Hollow and he had a live cam that we were going to be able to stream to our system and then I had I think three uh boxes with me that I was going to take up to New Jersey so we were going to have five live cams going uh
too bad we didn't have the interactive map back then right that would have been cool and we were going to cover from Western North Carolina up to baiting Hollow New York and then I would personally set up the three cameras myself along the Jersey Shore and I announced all of this I did um a YouTube
video on like January 19th um I'll put a
link to this video it's on YouTube it's still there and I'll put a link to it in the post when I put this on patreon and
on Discord we'll make sure we link to that YouTube video it's an offseason discussion I started doing those uh I guess at some point but uh yeah I did a video about it cuz this was a really big deal where we were looking at you know moderate to Major coastal flooding the storm is really starting to take shape here this is January 20th I tweeted here here it comes going to be a doozy hope people take it seriously and don't do dumb things I'm going to save this as one of our pictures here uh looks like we're up to picture number five for this episode that's a good one too big comma shape on it lots of energy that was dropping out of the uh Midwest that would eventually take shape off the southeast and then Mid-Atlantic and so forth so I'm tweeting at several people
up there Eric fiser who's you know real
popular uh up in the Boston area um CBS

News WBZ there um I mean just a legend

right and uh different people up there there's a dude on Twitter known as storm Force One and I was tweeting at him he Liv lives up there in Jersey up in the Brigantine area and he was giving me some advice of course we had Steve sinko Delaware Steve uh just lots of people that were excited about about me coming up to set
up these cameras and I was going to go to belmare that looked like a a shoe in
you know I had friends up there remember Belmar from Hurricane Sandy I do I did
and uh we still had good friends up there and I had the old Tahoe the original Chevy Tahoe with all the wind measurement stuff on it and you know getting on up there probably over at this point over 400,000 M on it I would have to think so I headed out on the road there January 21st took off on
Interstate 40 I'll post this picture for you too a really neat little picture of from the Tahoe from inside the Tahoe looking at I40 in North Carolina they had painted the um those salt stripes
the Brian or whatever they call it and I was joking I still do this again these are like Dad jokes or whatever dad or
bad whatever you want to call them they're pretty bad but it did it looked like a music staff and that's what I was saying you I said I feel like I'm driving on a blank music staff just need to fill in the notes and uh haha so here
it is here's the picture on January 21st it's a screenshot from cam 2 the uh Ustream Cam

that was up in Mitchell County in the North Carolina mountains and I believe the Weather Channel showed it on air and
that was really cool that was set up at my parents property looking across the hillside there with some snow on it I've saved that one for you to reference as well so be sure to check that out so I get on up there I'm even tweeting at the very famous and world-renowned uh Gary sitowski however
you say his name uh used to be at the national weather service up there in Mount Holly one of the legends that got people through Hurricane Sandy um kind of the Brian Norcross of
the Jersey coast uh from the national weather service up there he's retired and I was tweeting at him um he's following me on Twitter that was pretty cool cuz he was legendary Right just a huge fixture in the Hurricane Sandy Saga
and um I was headed up there I was like I'm I'm going to set these cams out we're going to do Belmar probably Seaside Heights cuz they were wrecked pretty badly during Sandy and boy The Surge forecast they from extratropical storms you know they run models for those they don't run the slash model for hurricanes it's an extr tropical storm surge model for these extratropical storms that are not tropical and uh it
was looking like we were going to get a big flood up there a big Surge and a couple High Tides uh pressures were going to be like in the mid 980s and uh here I am tweeting to uh storm Force One
um his name is Mike and uh he lives up there in the Brigantine area and I would eventually meet him and I I don't remember if I met him that year or if it was in uh the winter of 2017
I know I met him because he helped me to set out some cameras but I I swear I thought it was this time around but it might have been a year later when I was up there again but anyway I'm heading on up there get to Virginia and um the storm is really starting to take shape and I'm going to save this picture for you too check this out uh look at that comma shape on there just incredible the
energy that this storm was going to have it was diving down into the Gulf it was going to be kind of your classic Miller a R where the energy comes out of the
Northwest us down the plains across the gulf and then up the East Coast lots of energy lots of cold air lots of Dynamics
as they say and off off it would go this
thing would really take off and I get to my hotel cannot figure out exactly where
I am at this hotel doesn't matter too much but um I get to the hotel this is a picture from the hotel I'll save this for you too it's funny and I and this is
is funny cuz I tweeted this judging by the satellite truck and the bulldozer it looks like I'm in the right place and that was a minute before midnight that I posted that it is really neat that that metadata is saved for these tweets that
that's one great thing I love it that was a minute before midnight on January 21st 2016 I've got to be somewhere up there
in New Jersey or close by I would assume

um and then I posted a picture from my hotel room this is a classic I really hope you'll look at this one um this is one of the photos that I've saved it's like the 10th one just if you keeping count it's in my hotel room uh obviously
to the Hampton in or something like that and it's about 16 minutes later it's 12:15 a.m. and uh there they are the

three cams they are in the Pelican cases
what are those the IM 2075 or something like that and they
they look like little minions almost they got the uh 5200 sealant the little
acrylic lens on there the Ustream cam sits inside we had them labeled five six and seven I mean I guess we had other ones somewhere else or something I don't really remember why we had seven of them I guess we did okay uh but yeah I was ready to go I was really happy and I tweeted uh here the three brand new surge cams all set for the storm yo simply won't believe your eyes or ears cuz these did have audio once they are up so we get up to uh the 22nd and um I was tweeting here this is
interesting um talking with our good friend Tim Bruno and let's see what he said he said um wait that's funny he's referring to the numbers 5 six and 7 he said wait where's 1 2 3 and four and I
said uh one is in the mountains of North Carolina the other one's in Long Island New York so I must have sent one of them

to Dan I guess I must have been proactive and we had sent some cameras Elsewhere One to my parents and one to Dan up in um baithing Hollow that's
pretty cool so I get uh I get working
and on the 22nd here I tweeted out let's see what time this was 900 in the morning so I must have stayed like in New Brunswick or something in Jersey maybe at the same Hampton end that I stayed at when uh Sandy made landfall but whatever uh but by in the morning time on the 22nd of January first cams up and running from belmare New Jersey and you know I got in touch with my friends up there the former police captain uh Drew Heisman and my friend Bill Young up there and you know let the town officials know that there's going to be a yellow box uh strapped zip tied
whatever I was using wasn't using straps yet that's about two way two years away once I meet Brent we're getting to that we're getting there I use zip ties back then and then we would chain them up so hopefully nobody would steal them and um
so yeah the first one's up in belmare and uh then I went down to uh Seaside
Heights and uh then I went to Brigantine and I U mentioned this Mike fella uh
storm Force One on Twitter I said I'm headed your way now to set out the first cam I mean I guess I had already set out the one in Jersey um or maybe I was
streaming from belmare on Ustream from the Tahoe doesn't matter much but I'm in Jersey and it's time to get to work um
that must have been what it was cuz I said here live from Belmar New Jersey as I get ready to set up the surge cams and there's a link to Ustream which obviously that doesn't work anymore um so I must have started off in the morning working my way down the coast of New Jersey uh but yes I would eventually have a camera in belmare so I go down to Atlantic City the Brigantine area and and um I must have met up with Mike uh

this fella in the Brigantine area and I
thought that I had pictures of that but I can't seem to find them so I'm just wondering if maybe I didn't meet him that time um cuz I I just seem to remember
that there was a picture of me that he
took where the cameras are in the back
of the Tahoe with the back hatch thing open I know I remember that in my brain I just can't find it in my archives here
anywhere um it's not on uh it's not on
Twitter and it's not on my my hard drive that I've saved all this stuff on so maybe that was a different year or a different storm but it does eventually happen uh this dude Mike but anyway I get down to Brigantine uh set up the cam
we're good to go there I set one up and by the way it's right up on the seaw wall which pretty much you you have seaw walls and boardwalks and whatnot in New Jersey so I got Brigantine Jersey covered and then I go to Seaside Heights and I tweeted that uh currently in route to Seaside Heights New Jersey to set out the second storm surge camera and that was at 3:29 p.m. Sun's going to go down
in like an hour right it's winter time so I got to hurry and um I'm really
excited like you could just sense my
excitement in the tweets the live stream that I was doing everything was running really well um and uh you know Carrie was uh cheering me on from the uh cabox chat as were
several of our other supporters uh on the hurricane track premium Services site or Insider whatever we were calling it back then and um we had all the
cameras up uh live on one page I was
able to do like a mosaic where they're all there and it was just a proud moment it's really cool and so I finished up in belmare and uh set the last camera up um right
along the boardwalk there in belmare and I do remember specifically this is funny those of you that know my eating habits I went to um a town kind of away from

the coast not far I don't know what the town's called I could look it up but I won't worry about it uh cuz I wanted dinner it be the last time I could eat a good meal a good hot meal cuz this was going to be a pretty raging blizzard believe me uh but I went to Longhorn
um I don't know it's like 30 40 minutes away from belmare or whatever and it wasn't quite snowing yet and if it was it really light and I remember I had a good meal was by myself working this Mission by myself and when I was done and I came out the snow was coming down and it's like all right this is it this is real it's going to happen and um I tweeted here it's been a very busy day Place three cameras out along the Jersey coast and we also have one in Long Island right on the Long Island Sound the one up in the mountains of North Carolina the battery must have run out or what have you and so we had four cams going and we were all set for this big storm uh I'll save this picture here of the Tahoe uh you can see the snow coming down the anomet on the back there's no impeller or propeller the impeller is where the the wind makes it work the propeller means that it makes something go forward by the way so it's called an impeller uh but the impeller is not on because you don't keep it on when you're driving and then this next next picture is a good one um people were driving on the beach it's really funny this is uh also January 22nd it was a long day 10:15 I must be at my hotel kind of Basking in the glory of My Success of setting up these cams and the camera there in um this must be

this got to be Seaside Heights uh no let's where is this um

this might be Brigantine anyway says what are you doing cuz you can see somebody's headlights on the beach says oh just driving on the beach during a snowstorm and I I screen captured it and
I will save that for you folks you can check that out somebody driving on the beach there probably law enforcement or somebody just checking things out but yeah uh things were going well and the
wind was picking up um just like it was
whipping it was like holy cow like this is really working and so I go down to

the um Waterfront there in belmare and I got the Tahoe it's got the anemometer on I go ahead and put the impeller on and it's just windy as all get out I did a video posted it on Twitter the wind speeds are in the 20s and 30s which is pretty good for you know 12T above the ground which is what I indicated here on my post on Twitter wind speed 12 feet above ground level in belmare and um
yeah I took some video of that and it's just blowing real good there nobody out really but me me and here's a good picture uh you can see the snowband coming in I'm just north of Tom's River there in New Jersey and for those of yo that know snow radar shots you'll appreciate it that's a solid band it was really coming down uh what time was that this is now the 23rd so it's got to be like midnight or something 2:05 a.m. okay so it's really cranking out there on the Jersey coast um the camera at
Seaside Heights uh which was placed
right down on the boardwalk and I'm telling you I know I've got pictures of these uh setups somewhere and I'm going to find them might be in some different
folder sitting on some of these old Apple hard drives cuz what I do I've said this before I try to save the camera roll once or twice a year from my
iPhones to a portable hard drive and it just archives everything and I've saved all of them that's how we're able to do this um and I just I know I've got pictures of all this stuff I just can't find it right now but I will look for it and put effort into it and maybe I'll put a little addendum in here before this podcast episode is completely edited and I say hey I found them and be sure to reference them or whatever but
um yeah I remember I had the camera set up it's interesting because the one in Seaside hides is why I want to find it oh I remember now this is what's interesting about how I was doing these cameras back then and this is important so I'm glad I remembered remember what I say I remembered later I didn't forget I remembered later um I was using a combination of zip ties and bungee cords
to hold these cameras in place and so the one in Brigantine and I'm certain now that that guy Mike stormforce one on Twitter helped me and uh he held the camera I remember it was really cold my hands were really cold I remember that and um I would take the zip tie and kind of hold it up there tie it down and then
like take a bungee cord you could layer it and you you get the tension like pretty gnarly and you could bungee that thing on there and that worked it was on a lamp post in Brigantine and so that
was all set up and then the one in Seaside Heights I did by myself and what I had to do it was on a fence that was around some of the amusement park stuff there that they had rebuilt on the boardwalk after Sandy and the camera was
just pretty much right there at you know head level top of my head head I'm 5'8
so I would hold the camera with my forehead against this fence and then
take the bungee and wrap it around reach around the back so the hooks would hook together and it would hold it on and then I'd add more after that that's how I had to do it I had to figure it out so yeah it's all coming back to me how I did all this so everything's cool in uh
Brigantine the storm surge was starting to really come in big waves eating away the dunes it was it was impressive it really really was and um then we get to
the next day here's a good shot here I'll save this for you this is the shot from Brigantine and my tweet was uh
somebody brought their kids out to see it says hey kids want to go check out the nor Easter sun was up this is 8:41 in the morning on January 23rd um and then I guess I put a scene up there I don't have a picture of it but the camera I guess the camera in b bville was running all the way up to January 23rd because I I tweeted about it I said meanwhile a much more peaceful scene of snow near Bakersville North Carolina it was a Ustream link so it must have still been running but I don't have a picture to prove it but I tweeted it so there you go um and then I go out
I said heading out into the blizzard to take wind readings at the coast we'll start in Belmar go south from there I get on the Garden State Parkway this is a great picture that is a snowy picture if I've ever need one that's a classic from the Tahoe just myself the Tahoe
everybody watching on Ustream and that's it you a few Birds here and there I get into belmare this literally if I change this to black and white you could say that this was um that place in New York
Bedford Falls right where they did uh It's a Wonderful Life was uh Bedford
Falls sorry about the dog barking it's
uh it's not your dog it's mine I had somebody ask me one time they're like hey I was listening to one of your podcasts or one of your updates and I heard crickets and I swear I thought it was in my house and I realized it was on your recording I think it was one of my video discussions anyway that's my dogs not yours um but

uh yeah go out and I'm I'm hanging out during the day on um the the 23rd of

January uh just kind of hanging out and and taking win readings and whatever and then it gets dark and the lights are not quite on yet um in
Brigantine U we're going to come around to the second high tide cycle by the way it gets dark the lights do come on the street lights down there this is now 5:39 p.m. and it's winter time it's
January 23rd for Pete's sake so yeah it gets dark early I'll save this picture for you too this high tide cycle folks the big waves came in and it was really
dramatic watching this stuff unfold on

the Brigantine cam the Seaside Heights Cam and then the one up in belmare they got lucky I was really worried about them um I had even told uh Drew Drew
Heisman and Bill Young you know you guys could get a pretty sizable Surge and yo know you never know the how these things work it's not like a hurricane where yo can you really pinpoint the the highest surge but it could be bad we'll have to be ready um but boy down there at Seaside Heights the dunes that were on the left side of the shot they're just gone this the high tide comes in these big waves the superimposed storm surge
from the winter storm on top and yo know they had some flooding and they had some damage and it was um you know a
fairly big deal and uh it doesn't really
show I know this picture is not going to do it justice but I'm going to save it anyway this is our 18th picture by the
way that I have saved but this is a screenshot from the Ustream cam in Seaside Heights and it looks like snow is everywhere if you're looking at it check it out on the right hand side where the boardwalk is yes that's snow
on the left hand side that's all ocean foam from the very angry Atlantic and it
had erased the dunes and I do have some pictures of some before and after that I'll drop in here later and show you but it was pretty impactful it really was um
oh look at this wow wow I'm up here I'm
on January 23rd let's see what time this was 9:44 that evening and guess who I'm

tweeting at here wow all the way back
eight years ago because I'm recording this in 2024 Jack sillen yeah Jack sing so I tweeted to him let's see what he said because I was replying to him I said Can someone educate me as to just how you measure snow in something like this it blows around so much how do you choose where to measure Jack said cuz he lives up in New England
uh measure around where it looks even uh even is you know like where it's even like even is and average your measurements just don't include drift and Peaks um be grass in the average or
whatever so interesting Jack sillin
tweeting at me and me having a conversation with him going all the way back to 2016 that's really neat how about that and uh he's been a friend of mine ever since um so yeah the Long
Island Sound cam did great you know everything was just kicking butt here we go now we're get into the good stuff here um two pictures for you Seaside
Heights New Jersey after the storm um severe beach erosion is the result I'll save these for you wow look at that yo can see the the the erosion and the shot there and uh it was a I won't say it was
devastating but it certainly set them back and this one here is really good uh it's got the um what do you call it it looks like chair lifts because they had like a a gondola thing that ran down the
the beach it's Jersey they got these boardwalks and festivities out there and it's these uh looks like a ski lift I don't know what you call it but you can see the wires and the towers and if yo look at the picture and it's a nice picture it's like a nice winter day and there's waves coming in everything's flat that's the point it's all flat
whereas the day before and before before the storm you had six and 7ot Sand Dunes there they weren't vegetated I do remember that you know so they weren't like healthy I mean come on we just had Sandy four years earlier the dunes hadn't come back that strong yet but they did have Dunes out in front and now they're gone and you know that was a problem it was a bummer and really setting them back when we were starting to approach the 2016 hurricane season which apparently was already starting there with Alex in January so I uh
finish up I go down I pick everything up this is the 24th and um I cross the Susana River up

there near um near belir Maryland and

hav de or however you say it h a RVE
like Brett Favre so I guess is Harve degra to me it looks like Harve De Grace
and it's a real place sasana river goes through there it's this nice not a Gorge but it's this Valley and you come across this big amazing Bridge with these incredible views of the sasana river and it was darn cold up there in January late January 2016 and there's a nice picture for you of the Susana picture uh River with uh ice on it I won't call them icebergs cuz I think icebergs technically come from glaciers or I don't know maybe they don't but um anyway there's ice I say icebergs maybe
it is that's what I said always seem always nice to see icebergs floating in the water in New Jersey um cuz you cross over uh that can't be J it's like Delaware into Maryland or something like that but whatever um I was on my way
back home I stopped in belir Maryland and um tons of snow there I remember I went to a Boston Market how do you remember those things I don't know I just know that I was hungry and I needed a hot meal and I know that up there they are very well prepared and as soon as the storm is over they start plowing and they get things open and they don't mess around and Boston Market back in the day oh
that was some good eating as close to home cooking as you could get so yeah sought out and found some Boston Market
in belir Maryland and this is hilarious this is uh I'm getting close to home and uh the storm is gone you know after these big winter storms the atmosphere clears out everything's beautiful and crisp and the Sun is just blinding me so I took a selfie and you can barely see my face
which might be a good thing I don't know um in the one picture where it's the selfie cuz the sun is just blinding and then here's a shot of the sun itself I took two different pictures hey look when you're by yourself on the hurricane Highway you have to do stuff to keep yourself awake and from just going
absolutely Stir Crazy um interesting too
I'm trying to get through uh DC uh at
this point on the 24th it must have been an n NFL playoff game that for whatever reason I was interested in and I asked on Twitter Hey Washington DC peeps what
radio station is carrying the NFL game today for whatever reason I cared and so
I asked so whatever anyway I made it
back H get home um stopping along the way at um uh

what is that place Colonial Heights Virginia and Point South and there was
snow yeah pretty much all the way down into North Carolina obviously it got less and less and less the farther south I went
and um that was it I wrapped up a uh
potent winter storm in uh you know sort

of late January basically I was up there for several days and it was a really
really good test of this new uh Ustream
camera system these Logitech broadcasters again sent one to the mountains had with me and Jersey had one up in baiting Hollow with Dan and all
five of them did great and we were good you know we were ready like all right this could be this could be terrific now one interesting side note that I want to
talk about before I wrap up this episode here when I was in belmare New Jersey kind of during the height of the storm wind was blowing hard snow coming down
and it was nighttime storm was really cranking up I was outside the Tahoe trying to get some of those cool shots of sort of the back lit snow you got to know how to film these things so that it it brings out the true Dramatics of what's going on and I was doing one of these shots it was kind of a low angle shot I might have even been kneeling down or Crouch down to kind of get the Tahoe framed up and the lighting just right and the snow just cranking through there and I went back and looked at some of that video in in the days or whatever after the storm I I had already gotten back home and I noticed that I had
captured a couple of flashes of lightning in some of the clouds that were behind the lamp post that was in
the shot uh there was a a bright light there cuz you got to know how to try to frame things up so you can really see the snow and when you do this at night when it's there's a hurricane you have the got to have the rain lit right so that it looks like what it really looks like and when it's dark you got to take whatever lighting you can get and yo got to know how to get those shots but inadvertently I had captured thunder snow the lightning I didn't hear the thunder but I definitely caught the lightning and I had um actually I'd put it on Twitter and YouTube I made a YouTube video about it because I didn't really understand thunder snow I guess as much as I do now or um maybe at the
time I just confused it that uh with all
the dry air air in the winter storm and the Deep convection that was trying to develop um I thought that it was just
kind of like s Elmos Fire which is something that happens on ship's masts at Sea kind of the buildup of static electricity and that's all lightning is it's just super duper static electricity
but it was really interesting that I had captured lightninging uh there was two different flashes in the video and obviously I
can't show you video and an audio podcast but I'm going to put a link to
the um the YouTube video and the post on

Twitter on patreon in this post when I
post this episode there's going to be a lot included with this episode so that
you guys can see all this extra stuff but I kind of made a big deal about it I tweeted at Jim Cantor because he's the king of thunder snow um this was on
January 28th I had already been back several days I said Jim Cantor check it out looks like I caught something interesting during the blizzard last Friday night in New Jersey and um I uh

posted it a couple times really wanting to get traction with it I guess uh that it was really cool and I thought it was St Elmo fire or some kind of static discharge and it's interesting because it's one of the more viewed videos on my
YouTube channel that keeps coming up up
every once in a while it'll get a bunch of views and people comment on it all
kinds of bizarre stuff and I was wrong it was not St Elmo's Fire um I think I
put that in the title of the video like did I capture St Elmo's Fire question mark or something like that but I did in fact capture two lightning discharges uh

from what we would call thunder snow up there while I was in Belmar New Jersey at the height of the storm so there's that also um I did notice that yes I do have

those pictures um I checked during the last break there where the music played earlier of course I checked and so I found the pictures um where you can see
some of the uh deployments there in Seaside Heights and the storm uh case
boxes those IM 275 Logitech cam remote cams in the back

of the Tahoe there there's this guy Mike took a picture for me of me standing
there I'm kind of looking at one like okay I remember I remember how cold I was anyway I found the pictures and I
have included them uh in this episode over there on patreon and they'll be on Discord so check that out and as we wrap
up uh January here and again it's so neat to be able to just use Twitter advanced search and go back in time and there everything is all laid out um definitely was talking about me catching some weird static discharge lightning or whatever um and then I guess on the
29th of January I was trying out that
Periscope from Twitter it says live on
Periscope Periscope endurance test seeing how long it will go won't be monitoring the chat I remember Periscope had that chat just testing and then there's a periscope link periscope.tv does that even work anymore probably not
um Periscope that's just so funny that that's a thing of the past now I'm assuming and then as we got towards the

end of January um Carrie was really wanting me

and it made sense to go ahead and get my
amateur radio license and he ordered for me off of
Amazon the ham radio license
manual uh it says right on there I'll put a picture I'll say this picture for you all you need to become an amateur radio operator I got the book it was
level one that I was going to be studying for and um I would get my

license I I don't know if it was that year or 2017 um but yeah I started studying for

my amateur radio license there at the end of January the book came post a picture of it for you so you can check that out and um I think that's about it

for January the very last thing oh this is kind of cool I wrapped it up on January 30th my son and I'm assuming

that this was from my son Cole I have to

make sure about that let's see 2016 he would have been old enough to drive eight years ago probably so I just had to think of so I've got four sons and
two of them are definitely old enough to dve back in 2016 I would think um but

it's a really neat picture it's a panorama and it probably with some coal but it could have been from my oldest boy Nathan uh but it's a really cool picture this will be the last one that I share with you of uh the mountains up
there uh this is from ran Mountain um which is right there in the North Carolina Tennessee Border if yo ever heard of it or been there this is up at the top of the ran as my father
used to call it and um I tagged the
great James span and the great Brad
panovic there weather Brad and span yo
tag them when you want to share something big and epic don't you they are certainly well followed by a lot of
people so that wrapped up January a very

interesting exciting action-packed start

to 2016 that the year itself would go on to
be just unbelievable able with all kinds of stuff that's going to happen with the hurricane season and working with the
Weather Channel again officially that was awesome um you know just always

moving forward right everything was just it just keeps getting better and better and um we got the hurricane conference coming up uh the national tropical weather conference that I would go to um a Herby test out in Kansas uh I think in
May or June something like that with Carrie and Todd and Greg and myself so
I'll tell you all about all of those things in the coming episodes here and
very importantly don't want to forget too the next episode and me trying to
keep it all in chronological order is going to focus on the month of March
2016 and uh this major flood that
happens along the Sabine River in the town of Deweyville so I already know what the name of the next episode is going to be the title the Great Ville flood uh really exciting episode where I

learned the power of Google uh street view and how to work with somebody that's not in my same town to help deploy cameras and whatever oh boy it's going to be a great episode when we talk about the great Deweyville flood of 2016
all right so that'll do it for this episode of stories from the hurricane Highway as always thank you for tuning in I do appreciate it I do appreciate your feedback and I really hope that yo can check out these pictures as I post them remember they are on Discord um I
guess I could put in some kind of a hashtag and uh from now on so that it
makes it easier to find these on Discord probably the hash podcast that's just real easy and I don't know if I can go back and retroactively I could spend some time and try to find the old posts but let's do that let's just make it a thing going forward to find these on Discord just look #p podcast and um yo
should be able to find when I posted uh at least this episode and hopefully I can retroactively go back and edit previous uh previous posts and um add
the hasht podcast in there and of course these are on patreon as well got to do a bit of searching um stories from the hurricane Highway should do it but yeah these pictures are really neat and I'm glad to be able to include those uh and
um you know give you a visual of what we were doing along these journeys of the very real and often metaphorical hurricane Highway all right all right that's it from me I am Mark sth of course again thanks for tuning in this has been stories from the hurricane highway I'll talk to you again soon