[Music]

it's a category 2 hurricane out here did the Western eye come ashore yes it did it came right across right down over top of us right there there is the hurricane landfall project truck it's all set up strapped down we're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe we are getting into the eye wall of hurricane Jean right now core came in on Shore here along the Southeast coast of
these little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that
[Music] surge hello again to you and welcome to another Edition here of stories from the hurricane highway I am your host Mark suth great to be back with you again as we start a new episode and a new year we

are up to 2015 now and boy what an
exciting year this was lots of stuff happens as most years do except except 2013 that was pretty slow but yeah 2015
we are busy I'm covering the winter storms and what a major winter weather year 2015 was we had a big L Nino that

developed later in 2015 we tested Herby

again um out in Texas with Carrie and
Todd we debuted fully these brand new
camera systems from Logitech moving fully into that realm away from the old system you know just a lot of stuff happening I grew my family by one more in 2015 our seventh child and for those
of you that are new to the podcast and my story and you're going hey wait did he say seven yes I did our seventh child

Daphne our daughter Daphne was born in 2015 we moved into a new house brand new
house built it from scratch and uh
really had come a long way since all the changes in the post Low's era
persevering and got that contract with the Weather Channel in 2014 and that along with just a lot of
great people supporting me including my wife and my family my friends friends of the project you name it I was able to persevere and here I was adding an
office to this new house I'd have my own office with lots of plugs put in we told
the architect and the Builder we need a few extra plugs in the uh the home office there so Dad can do his hurricane track work yeah that would all happen in 2015 and what an amazing year it was big winter weather year you might recall um
all the snow up in the Northeast Boston had so much snow that they had to bulldoze it and dump it into the Boston Harbor and there were snow piles that hung on even into July and then of course we had the Big Al Nino that developed in 2015 and I would actually taunt the AL Nino with a tweet TW we'll get to that in just a little bit and I I got it thrown back in my face that's for sure but we had a big alino that developed in 2015 and that put sort of a damper overall on the 2015 hurricane season for the Atlantic but not so much the Pacific
um just a big big year went over to Houston uh in October and uh did some
testing of some equipment you with carry
that would prove very very important
down the road and you know kind of informing the future as they say so yeah we didn't have a lot of hurricane stuff in 2015 but boy was Hurricane track the
brand and yours truly with some of our partners that we work with Carrie and Todd and other people that helped us out
um we'll get to all that in this episode of stories from the hurricane highway so let's start at the beginning that's always a good spot you know if we want to do it linear on the timeline it won't
be like Pulp Fiction where everything's all out of whack and you go wait a minute what did I just watch we'll stay linear that just makes it easier all right so that was a good summary of what we're going to discuss now let's go to the timeline the Twitter timeline and look at the beginning January 1st I
tweeted happy New Year as my friend Michael Locka says stay windy my friends
Michael Locka probably the most famous

um little known hurricane Chaser you've ever heard of you know does that make any sense at all he's very accomplished goes back several years even before I got started and not a lot of people know about him that's just you know his style he's not out in front like we are you know with hurricane track and other people that you know of right but boy is he a historian walking Encyclopedia of information real good friend of Greg Nordstrom and a friend of mine I've met him a couple of times um this dude's legend by the way he was in Hugo in Sam Juan Puerto Rico back in '89

I was still just out of high school for goodness sakes but anyhow Michael Locka has this expression he's like he likes to say stay windy my friends kind of a
playoff of the old stay thirsty my friends from the most interesting man in the world or whatever he's called you've seen that Meme I'm sure well Michael
kind of modified it stay windy my friends so that's how we started 2015 with Mark being some somewhat of a smart alec so we go through and it's not even
like a few days in it's uh warm January
4th I tweet at 68 degrees here in Wilmington but apparently some big time cold was coming because I say I want to Simply pass on the cold air that's due to arrive lat later in the week and our first picture that I'm going to save for you and I'm going to tag all of these as 2015 and then we'll put a letter A B C
whatever so the first one 2015 15a kind of looks like the VAC the vascular system of a person it's pretty neat and it's Washington DC and you'll
see when you see the picture and hopefully you get a chuckle um it was
busy up there they had a snow jam on January 6th because this cold air was coming we had a heck of a winter in the east in 2015 that is for sure so the first picture that I posted on Twitter for the new year was a clogged up Washington D DC I bet it was an absolute nightmare up there all that red and orange on the picture holy cow it's a Google Maps picture and it literally looks like vasculature I think that's a word medical term um so yeah wow so the

next picture uh I said you know it's cold when the Great Lakes have their own drop Shadows this will be picture B and
it was it was really really cold and that cold dense air adex or mov moves
horizontally or laterally uh cold air
advection or CAA as we call it it moves across the lakes and you get clouds and lake effect snow that'll form downwind but then on the upwind side there's no clouds there in this situation so you see the darkness of the water and you know the water is warmer
so it shows up as a darker color on the infrared what clouds there are are a
little higher up so they are lighter in color and like a drop shadow in graphic design and if you look at the picture picture B you'll see what I'm talking about there so we move along and it's
getting cold it finally gets cold in Wilmington we even had a couple snow flurries uh tweeted like 27 of them or something like that but boy on January 8th it was definitely cold I took the kids to school in the old Tahoe there
and um imagine riding to school in the Tahoe by the way way what what fun that must have been but anyhow 16 people would
come up hey man is hurricane coming like n it's January what do you come on anyway it was 16.1 degrees I'll save
this picture as picture C for you and
where I'm going with all this is the back and forth nature it was 68° one day and then a few days later it's 16° you know the crack sidewalk business very much in play in North
Carolina so it looks like I'm going to

be really busy in January because the
winter weather scene does start to go bananas as we get to Mid Monon and Beyond signs are there
that we're going to get a big winter storm up in the Northeast um you know
and I'm like all right I think I'm going to cover this but before we got to that
here's my tweet I'm looking at it here I taunted the old El Nino there now we got to understand El Nino typically means a lackluster Atlantic hurricane season typically for various reasons and there
was a lot of talk that an El Nino was going to be coming in 2015 in fact some

people thought it was going to happen in 2014 it did not and so I posted a

graphic here I'll save this as uh picture D of the subsurface chart that I show
often and you can see these cold anomalies down at the subsurface and some warm anomalies but like there's no El Nino so I said hey how's that El Nino going yeah
not so well you know kind of being again a little bit of a smart alec there taunting nature and nature certainly threw it back in my face cuz that particular chart months down the

road I'm sure I referenced it again and
when I find it later on in a future episode I'll I'll talk about it but uh yeah check that out the subsurface there no El Nino yet January 13th uh was the picture on the chart uh

because it gets updated every week or something like that and I posted it on the 21st and boy was I you know would I

find out as they say all right so we get towards the end of the month the last third of the month and looks like some
big time winter weather's coming significant storm wind and snow for parts of the Northeast I mentioned this on the 24th of January even hinting at a
road trip and sure enough on the 25th I hit the road and I'm going to head up to Long Island uh I stay um up in New

Brunswick and in fact oh this is a nice picture here on Twitter um I'll post this as what are we up to e something like that uh what a beautiful shot yeah
picture e of the fledgling storm system
and I even tweeted that my friends is the innocent little storm that will cause so much Mayhem for the Northeast starting tomorrow now this really was looking like a big winter storm could do blizzard conditions up there 18 to 24 in
of snow maybe more blowing snow flights
cancelled traffic disrupted hey it sounds like a great thing for me to cover and again I was very excited about being able to do so I still had my
contract and partnership with the Weather Channel that would go through the end of May it was a one-year contract they had already paid me
everything they were going to pay me that was done in four different lump sums if you will in 2014 so I had to make sure I managed that fund as much as I could the funding
from them and I was still doing a few odds and ends other things filming a couple of dance competitions here and there for some extra income um and uh you know had the support of some crowdfunding through hurricane track and so things were looking pretty good in 2015 overall so I hit the road very
excited to get up there and uh capture
this winter storm intercept it whatever you want to call it in Long Island and I stayed up in New Brunswick in New Jersey
at the same hotel that I had stayed in uh the night that Sandy made landfall so that was kind of cool to stay at that hotel and a lot of times I'll do that on these trips you know I know I've been in this area before and I know what hotels are good I know where the good restaurants are you do this long enough and all that stuff just starts to become fairly routine so this is a good picture
here picture F and I said uh it's funny CU I stayed in New Brunswick the arctic front had come through so the antecedent cold air is in place very important to have that deep cold air and it snowed a little bit an inch or two as I was sleeping and uh I even drove through some snow up through the New Jersey Turnpike to get to New Brunswick as I recall and so I got this picture here it says what F I think we're up to and um
it's the Tahoe um no it's not F we'll get back to it in just a second I forgot I had another one in there that's going to be F I'll tell you about it in a second but um the picture of the Tahoe it's got some snow on it and I said on Twitter ha that's just the beginning there old fella got to going to see a lot more boy the Tahoe you look at that picture and I think about all the adventures that that vehicle got us through you know 468,000 Mi something
like that total man oh man and these
winter storms in 2015 that was amazing now that's picture
G picture F I saved it earlier it was
doing a little bit of prep ahead of time is very very important I didn't tweet the picture that's why it's not in my Twitter timeline to reference but picture f is really important and I want you to look at it if you don't mind if if yo can it's very simple but it's very
important because and it's a funny looking picture there's three cases two yellows and a black a spare tire and a
very Hefty 2ton capacity Jack like what

am I looking at here Mark um long story
short the underp part of the Tahoe where
the tire goes had already rusted out by
this point in time in the Tahoe's life and so it just fell off like the old
spare and all the other stuff fell off I think in 2012 somewhere in Louisiana or something I was on some adventure with Carrie I think coming back from the first Herby test with Greg I don't know but anyway the spare tire and the mechanism that kept it under the Tahoe were literally gone you know all the years of doing stuff it just rusted away that was in 2012 like I said so I carried my spare in the Tahoe you know cuz I'm not going to have you know the Chevy dealership rebuild the thing to to put it underneath I like whatever I'll just carry the spare with me so that's why there's a picture of the spare tire and the Jack but that's not what's important okay don't let that distract you what's important are those three cases and let me unpack what we're talking about here and why this is a big deal those three
cases are small they are lightweight

they are rugged their military spec right and in each of those cases we have a Logitech Broadcaster streaming camera that goes directly to Ustream they are already paired up and ready to go there is a Verizon hotspot in each of those three cases so three of those and we have six
battery packs total two in each case
from a company called RAV power that would provide hopefully around 24 maybe

30 hours of stream time and battery time

for the hotspot so one battery would
power these are USB by the way USB powered One battery would power the hotspot the other battery would power the Logitech the broadcaster ladies and gentlemen this is Monumental in scale for what it meant
for the project we don't have these gigantic batteries these agms it's all
USB powered everything is USB it's push

button you turn it on Power It Up Turn It On press the big button on the Logitech and it just starts streaming that's it it's already set up and ready to go directly to our Mount points as we called them over on my Ustream account
and we would be good to go a remarkable
change finally after all the years of
using those bullet cams and the very heavy bulky cases these things were nothing you could stack them up up in your arm and carry them like you're carrying in a bag of groceries and you're good to go and again the Hope was
that this full test of just this equipment would be
successful and I could do it in a real operating setting you know like the big winter storm and the other part of this is that's just so important notice the white rings around each of the little glass
looking things that's acrylic actually the lenses if you will that we covered the holes cuzz you had to drill a hole then the Logitech would peek out and yo can see each of the Logitech camera lenses pressed up against these acrylic discs we got those from US Plastics and
then we sealed this thing back up with
5200 adhesive sealant from 3M that I

learned about in Bermuda isn't that amazing how all that works and just little things like this would become so important for the future of the project
all of that information you look at these three boxes what's the big deal three cases great it's common place now
back then this was the first time anybody was ever going to do anything like this I had started it 10 years
before with the very first generation of
a bullet cam big laptop battery you know the whole story now we're revolutionizing it again the first time
that anybody would deploy a WiFi based
camera on its own completely independent of anything else not on somebody's Wi-Fi it's not plugged into somebody's modem you know and it's a size a little bit bigger than a lunchbox this was going to be gargantuan for the project and I was very excited
to test this in this first big winter storm on Long Island New

York [Music]

all right back with you again stories from the hurricane Highway discussing the first big winter storm that I'm going to cover in the year 2015 up in Long Island and um we get through my
little overnight stay there in New Brunswick again that is picture G and
off I go fairly early in the morning yo know 9 10:00 something like that early enough for me and uh New Brunswick's not that far from you know New York City itself now for this uh winterstorm field
Mission I'm going to stay and work with
a really really good friend of the project that I've known this guy a long time his name is Dan going to leave his last name out just out of respect to him
fairly private individual um but boy has
his contribution to the project with ideas I mean this guy introduced me to patreon we're going to get to that and um who knows maybe I'll be able to get Dan to come on the podcast one day that would be great we'll see um such a
humble wonderful guy he's got a house up
on Long Island on um Long Island Sound and baiting Hollow and lives out there
Works in Manhattan all that stuff so he's a long Islander but a huge weather geek just like me very techsavvy again
introduced me to a lot of different things you know hey you should try this battery try this camera he's the guy that introduced me to the nestcam by the way which we get to you know about 3 years down the road from this episode uh in the timeline right so that's Dan baiting Hollow New York we're going to go up up there I'm going work with him stay at his place all that good stuff so I leave New Brunswick hit the road I'm well rested ready to go uh cross over on
the Long Island itself over the George Washington Bridge and I'm ready and my

first task and I thought this was pretty cool so I wanted to like go all out here
and you know let's let's go big or go home as they say so my first camera
location is actually going to be on the western side of Long Island over in newh
Hyde Park and so you know if you look at Long Island in the that area of New York
you have the different Burrows you yo have Manhattan and Central Park and all that right New York New York City then you have Brooklyn and then you move East from there you got queens and then East from there among other places new hide park now I don't know exactly why I chose new hide Park but I did I think
part of it was driven by my need to get
lunch slash breakfast or brunch
whatever um so I go to Boston Market in

New Hyde Park around 11:00 they open at 11: I know this stuff and um I got lunch

and I told Dan you know I'm going to set a camera up somewhere around here and I was driving around it's like Highway 25 that goes through there it's like a big thorough fair and then all these little cross streets and you have new hide Park Stewart Manor Floral Park Garden City Park and it's just a densely populated area that was important to me I needed to know two things how does the Verizon
hotspot do in a densely populated area
and how does the Logitech do and yo
know it was also kind of risky you know this is the first time I'm going to put out this little box all by it itself and
I'm by myself and it's going to be in an urban setting just east of New York City
right on Long Island that was pretty gutsy you got to admit so I'm looking around I'm like where can I do it and there's a couple spots where there were some poles some steel or wooden light poles or whatever and I come across this
little neighborhood area in new hide Park a little Street there and there's a
Catholic church and school I don't remember the name of it but I was like all right this should work you know it's a nice little neighborhoods right next to this church and school and surely those folks will leave it alone I mean right I should be fine and uh so I
pull up in in this parking area like parallel parking and there's a um a
steel pole utility pole whatever yo want to call it and it's got like a don't walk a don't walk yeah don't walk sign crosswalk that's what I'm trying to say area for this Catholic church and
school pretty busy neighborhood right and I thought you know what just go for it so I got the camera running and I got to emphasize again it's really easy to do this you power on the

hotspot just turn the Verizon hotspot on it gets a signal 4G ready to go yay then
you turn on the Logitech and it's already paired or coupled with the hotspot you know it's all set up this little app from Ustream and once it's on
you press this button on top it turns green and you're streaming with audio Good To Go close it up and put it on the pole so I got a little L bracket and I
gorilla taped that onto the pole first it's cold out there too by the way it's like in the 20s uh upper 20s probably
and there's people walking around and what is this guy doing but at least I had the Tahoe so it looks like well it's
some weather chaser whatever you know it it it wasn't like I was pulling up next to this Catholic church and school in a white van and putting this box up yo
know the Tahoe is the Tahoe it's got my website on it and if anybody you know hey man what's going on at least it would have made sense my story would have checked out right so I put the
camera up I held it on with bunge cord
sadly for whatever reason I didn't take
any pictures of this that I can find and
if I do find them later before I publish this episode I'll add them in for sure
so don't worry about that that'll definitely be um something that I can do
so my phone was ringing there I got to shut that off so I'm interrupting my recording here um but I didn't take any pictures that I can find of the setup I don't know why probably because I was by myself and I wanted to get out of there
uh but anyway if I do find one later maybe hidden on one of my hard drives or something um I'll post it as an addendum all right so first camera bottom line
and this is huge the new era of remote
cams truly begins with a real live fire

test whatever you want to call it new hide Park Long Island that was it and
The Weather Channel I sent the information to them here's where the camera is whatever and so that was it the camera's up and running you know it's right there new hide Park ready to go waiting for the winter storm hoping that you know maybe the wind will kick up when the snow starts falling and kind of blow it all around it' be a nice dramatic shot weather channel was excited about it our folks on the
hurricane track site on the seab boox
chatting about it uh Delaware Steve
Steve sinko just thrilled you know that I'm finally doing this like fulltime so to speak like I'm all in he had you know encouraged me years before you got to cover those winter storms and boy there was definitely a big one coming so new hide Park all set up ready
to go now it's time for me to get on out and meet Dan over at baiting Hollow and
here's a great shot here's a snowy uh picture there snow starts to come down on 495 and I'm headed out east uh to
meet Dan let's see what picture I'm going to make this one that'll be H and
again if I find a picture of the setup in new hide Park I will add it but picture H as in Harry will be uh of 495

there you can see the hood of the Tahoe on that snowy road so I get out to baiting Hollow and I meet up with Dan
and the second camera is going to go on
the bulkhead of his house down you know

at the water obviously on Long Island Sound down at the beachfront and he lives up on a bluff as most of those houses do there it's the North Shore of Long Island and um it's windy already getting really cold it's in the 20s and the snow's starting to come down and we go down to
the Waterfront and we put one of the cameras the second one on one of the
wooden pilings for the lack of a better word that's part of the super structure of the bulkhead that keeps the sound when it gets rough out there from just tearing away at the bluff and it's kind of like a wooden seaw wall if you don't know what a bulkhead is but whatever um so we set that up we bungee it on there we didn't worry about locking it and I don't think I locked up the one and new hide Park either we didn't quite have a way to do that yet or so I don't know I was just very trusting I suppose um and uh he's like
yeah nobody's going to come down here to the Waterfront and you know it's it's Northshore of Long Island everybody's whatever like no problem shouldn't it shouldn't be an issue and uh and if anybody does come up and grab RB it we'll see who it is cuz everything is stored in the cloud from Ustream which by the way that's very important to note too all the Ustream stuff the moment it starts streaming that's all saved right into the Ustream cloud and Ustream eventually got bought by IBM by the way several years down the road but uh yeah
uh second camera goes up there at uh Dan's bulkhead looking out at into Long
Island Sound across that sort of Rocky water front and then the third
camera I was thinking about maybe
putting it over in Riverhead itself uh but that just seemed a little too far away I wanted to kind of keep things somewhat close I it's not too
like not tens of miles away but I just thought for this test let's try to keep
stuff fairly close we got one down at the bulkhead and maybe we can put the other one somewhere around baiting Hollow so what's really cool here about this part of long Island that I didn't know and luckily I was out there in the daytime you know starting all this stuff setting up everything as much of a contrast as it
could possibly be to Western Long Island
Eastern and Central Long Island is amazing it is open rolling
Countryside picturesque especially in the winter I've never been up there well actually I was up there in 2021 for summertime event we'll talk about that later but in the winter it's just this
wonderful again it's like a painting it's amazing farm country you know um

just wide open spaces all these big trees that's wintertime so there's no leaves on them it's just got that look like a painting should be of a big wintry scene I don't know how to to describe it just incredible and everything's snow covered cuz it had already been a pretty big winter so far
and there's more snow falling it's a little Breezy already ah it was just amazing up there and we found this road and you got to understand looking at Google Maps here I'll try to describe it you have Highway 25A that's on the north side of Long Island that's a major route it's called
Route 25A I don't know if it's four lane or not doesn't matter but it's a big thoroughfare and that's how you go fairly quickly east to west on the north
side of Long Island right and so you can get to Great Neck baithing Hollow Stony Brook Oyster Bay so forth and so on to
the South a few miles is 25 so Route 25

and then to the south of that is the uh
Parkway 495 right the major four lane
deal in between 25A and 25 are these

little connectors some of them are bigger roads than others but then there are these even smaller like County Roads that
crisscross the area some of them are not even marked it's just asphalt and no markings to speak of and again these go across these just wonderful Open Country

areas that are just like really amazing
they really are and we chose one of
these just south of baithing hollow a few miles from Dan's Waterfront Long
Island um property there and we got to
this field and again it's just this wide open you know snowy field and there's a
wooden telephone pole utility pole we
bring the L bracket out grillot tape that on and it acts like a little yo know stand if you will to hold the camera's weight and we bungee cord the
camera box to the pole and the bungee cords now of course we use ratchet straps and we I learned about that a few years years later um but uh let me I
might even be able to find this road yeah I know exactly what road it was it was called osbor osbr and Osborne Avenue

and it literally comes right out of baiting Hollow and um you have uh sound Avenue

which is also kind of branches off of uh
25A uh and then Osborne Avenue and it's
just this beautiful wide openen country
road like I said so there this field out there we put the camera on the bo uh on the pole secure it down with bungee cord
and it's shooting across this field it's gray out there windy a little bit and we're good to go all three cams are running and we go back to his place we're hanging out and waiting for the storm to come and it's rocking and rolling the sun goes down and I'm like
all right Dan I got to get out and uh go
to you know Riverhead and drive around around as best I can um and uh do my
thing get some wind measurements whatever now they've got a driving ban but for whatever reason I thought well with with me working with the Weather Channel maybe they'll give me a pass you know not like a physical pass but like hey what are you doing out here I'm shooting video doing well yo shouldn't be out here be careful maybe they'd be okay I don't know but he was like yeah you got to be careful there is a driving band um so you know you're on
your own I like all right so I went out into the evening time I went over to uh
Riverhead which is a nice area and it's you know a few miles away from from baiting Hollow where Dan is um where his
house is and uh I just kind of shot
video with the iPhone um you know streaming live on
Ustream of course from the uh the the dash because we had the dash cam was a Ustream camera and we were watching the camera over in New Hyde Park and um of
course the ones you know on his Waterfront and the one on Osborne Avenue it was dark so you really couldn't see much and it was just an incredible experience the storm ramped up as I look through Twitter here um I'll save this one let's see what time this was 8:00 in
the evening uh I posted the picture at
8:12 ah I mean it was just this incredible band coming in and you winter storm lovers up there you'll know this will be 201 uh5 um I the letter i 2015 I for this radar

shot very reflective band coming in uh
Eastern Long Island I'm like you I'm going to go to Riverhead to try to film this snow band when it arrives I am minutes away and uh oh yeah the snow I'm

just looking at some of these posts I'm making it was really blasting hard there
um in uh Eastern Long Island

uh myometer I'm tweeting to somebody here that I'm getting 45 mph so forth
and so on blizzard just full on man it

was incredible snowband comes through
it's just raging out there Dan and I get out in a little bit of it I'm going to post this one for you this is 1:36 in
the morning now on January 27th what a remarkable picture this is what winter looks like by the way for those of us that have been missing winter as of late let's see h i j got to

remember my Al alphabet this is picture number J or picture J all right um at

least we won't go past Z because that's 26 letters and I'm not doing doubles and we don't have too long to go I'm up to January 27th and we'll be done with this episode January will be the first episode as I mentioned so anyway uh gosh I just look at this picture it's like wow I remember it so I
get out in uh the very early morning
hours there of the 27th and I shot some different video I think Dan was with me he went out with me and it is just cranking snow drifts I don't think I had
ever seen snow drifts like this before in my career in my life whatever just
the way I it was incredible it was really I was like I totally get it like
I really really get it why people like winter weather absolutely remarkable so shot some video and uh posted stuff to Instagram and clearly this is 2015 and there still is no video from me

on Twitter so I guess they just didn't do video on Twitter yet cuz any video that I did I put on my Instagram and obviously any video would just be wind blowing and snow howling around right so

the next day this is a great shot from Dan's front door we'll make this the next photo for yo 2015 um K got to remember my letters man that's hard it snowed a lot so Dan's car is in

front my Tahoe's behind and we're talking you know a foot or more lots and
lots of snow it's still very windy just
amazing his house was rocking I remember trying to get some sleep that night in uh one of his guest bedrooms and it was just rocking and rolling out there the next one will be L picture L Long Island Sound looks like the Atlantic Ocean in a hurricane or something I mean it is just churned up uh he's got a hurricane flag on his flag pole there really cool stuff
and so he and I walk around and you know
in the snow like a couple of kids it's very fluffy snow I remember that very
well and um so it wasn't difficult to
walk you know the heavy wet stuff that's harder and it was very very cold the wind was still blasting my face hurt I was like oh man there's that bones in my face hurting because it's so darn cold and um
I learned very quickly that they're on
top of it out there the plows you get off the secondary roads and like if yo can make it through those onto a more

prominent road for the lack of a better way to put it you're good to go so
literally this you know one of those pictures I got there you see all the Raging Water and the snow on the cars or whatever that's baiting Hollow we go in the Tahoe four-wheel drive so it makes it a little easier they do plow and they do a really great job and we go into somewhere near
Riverhead I guess and we go to a Dunkin Donuts of course and I even said that I'll put this cuz it's just a funny picture I tweeted at Jim Cantor this will be uh what are we up to m um
picture M I said uh an
oasis in the blizzard just have to right
uh tagged cantori in that picture and um

it was incredible just blew my mind like
I this is amazing all that wind the rolling Countryside the beauty of it all and then finally on the 27th what a great picture to kind of wrap up this episode or begin wrapping it up a spectac acular Sunset will be picture in
as in Nancy and I remember I tweeted
this to David Clark the president of the
Weather Channel at the time and um yo

know they Nam The Weather Channel names the winter storms as part of their marketing and this was Juno and um yo
know I don't know if I tagged D I think I emailed him but I tagged The Weather Channel beautiful sunset here in Riverhead New York and it was it was
just go man I I I'll never forget this
one Adventure really it was everything
about it was special doing it with Dan and how much he loves this stuff he loves these big winter storms it was
really really special so um I was able

to produce some uh time
lapses from the Ustream
video uh trying to remember did I go back to his house or did I do it elsewhere I don't have a lot of info on the Twitter here but I definitely was able to pull down and that's what was interesting about it Ustream would save everything and I would pull it down I believe they had it so let's say the camera camera ran for
24 hours and by the way I guess I should mention that let me get my thoughts together here all three cameras worked
great nobody messed with any of them the one in new hide Park no problem everything worked spectacular ularly everything worked for at least 24 hours maybe even 30 so they survived the
cold the wind they weren't wet cuz yo
know they're all sealed and everything but you know they were covered in snow and whatnot and it was a successful test
I would say 100% And so all this video
is stored on the Ustream cloud and I
would go in and pull down these files and they were in 3H hour chunks so for the sake of argument let's say a camera I'm to run it for 12 hours I would have
four 3-hour chunks right yeah 4 * 3 is

12 for some reason I had to think about that that's okay so I'd pull these down
in three-hour chunks that's just how Ustream did it and I would then process
them using um Adobe Premiere Elements on
my laptop into a time lapse or get Clips or
whatever I want want and I would put those on my FTP server this is before
dropbox at least before I had it and uh send it to the Weather Channel and they would show stuff or share it on YouTube
with uh our cbox chat for our supporters

put a link on YouTube to YouTube on Twitter and in fact that's what I did and I'm going to make sure I put a link to this on patreon as well and on
Discord to this YouTube video of this time lapse so all in all knocked it out of the park

to start 2015 with this incredible adventure to the Northeast working with Dan again I
cannot say enough about how awesome that guy is his enthusiasm for the weather
his his knowledge everything his Tech
just an amazing dude and just to do that with him um was really really a lot of
fun it was and it was a a great accomplishment we tested the cams they all worked great you know went back and picked everything up uh with ease I say
with ease I mean there's these big snow drifts over in on Osborne Avenue I remember him and I having to you know stand in like two or three foot deep snow drifts to get that camera off the pole uh and then I went back to New hide Park I grabbed that camera nobody said anything you know was all great and I
made my way back home and all right yo know when is the next one that's the way I looked at it I was so excited about this winter storm stuff and it was neat
to see my stuff on the Weather Channel they would show the shots from time to time and uh I it was just great so

that's how I started the year 2015 and um we end January my last tweet
of January was on a Thursday obviously
how do I know that because it says here is my hash TBT and you guys know what
that is right throwback Thursday there's all kinds of stuff now on Twitter and elsewhere so throwback Thursday my last
tweet of 2015 of January 2015 not quite
all of 2015 yet my last tweet of January 2015 happened on the 29th and um it says

this is a still frame from our unmanned cam set up during Hurricane Ike in 2008
in Galveston and I think that's an appropriate way to wrap up this episode and just everything about January
2015 the picture that I tweeted on throwback Thursday it's pretty dramatic and we're going to save this because I want you to just imagine how that
picture came to be so to speak and we're
up to O picture o it's a nice shot uh

looking out at the seaw wall there's a couple people out there probably reporters a huge waves crashing it's a still frame from the old bullet cam
system from the first generation of the
remote cams that was from a yellow storm
case I know this cuz I still have it
even today and in that case was a giant
battery weighed 50 lbs a laptop a VCR

the inverters all that so the throwback Thursday January 29th was Ike in 2008

yet that same month just a few days

earlier we set up the whole project now
I'm talking collectively I might be the guy behind it but it is we set up the
first deployment of what would be the
future of this whole project with these Logitech cameras and they worked the images were better they were 16 by9 yo
know the video was widescreen not square 4x3 like the old cameras were we had
audio um they would stream and I think
think 480 I believe maybe even 720 if we
pushed them but we could you know set that we could change the bit rate and it was just remarkable just that juxtoposition and contrast that picture there from Ike

and knowing how far we had come since when that picture would have been snapped in 2008 all the way over 7 years
later Long Island New York would be the beginning of this new generation of deployment and we'd continue on you know into February with even more all right
so yeah that'll uh wrap up this episode of stories from the hurricane Highway and the month of January 2015 as always thank you for your support thank you for listening and if you've been with us for all this time from 08 to now I mean this is one of those episodes where you know how far we have come and it is truly remarkable so thank you very much for your support over the years whether you're brand new or you've been with us since all the way back then it is such a neat thing and a privilege to be able to tell you all these stories as we recount all the
stuff that has happened to get us to where we are today all right again I am Mark suth the host of this podcast I'll talk to you again real [Music]

soon

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