Stories From The Hurricane Highway Season 1 Episode 16 Transcript - 2004 Part 2 / 8

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hello and welcome to stories from the hurricane Highway the podcast I am your host Mark Sudduth this is the episode dropping on March the 19th 2020 and all I'm going to say is ah wow um you know what though this is not about current events so I'll just let that sigh speak for everything the despair uh that's in my voice there because this is all about the past and um as we take a look back down the hurricane Highway in the rearview mirror as it were hey that's a good way to put it um we're looking at the year 2004 and we're continuing on this is part two or part three or whatever it is it's getting to me um we're gonna look at uh and this will be fairly short this episode here this installment um we're going to take a look at some technology uh Transitions and an idea that I had as we were progressing through the year 2004 uh after the tornado chasing that we did myself and Jesse and John and then we did that on Memorial Day Weekend The Day After Tomorrow movie was out and then all of a sudden it's summer um you know once we got back from the Memorial Day Weekend tornado chasing Festival that we had in Kansas uh it was basically summer and certainly the start of hurricane season 2004 but as you know the um the hurricane season really didn't get going until the end of July and then it just kept going for about six weeks and we know what happened after that and we will get to that but first uh we're going to talk about the birth of something that really was the beginning of where we are now and it really was and that is the hurricane landfall project um just to kind of recap and set the stage we had the Chevy Tahoe fully outfitted with weather equipment the anemometer the pressure sensor had a video camera mounted on the roof all kinds of stuff on the roof it very much resembled a movie set piece like out of the movie Twister you know it looked like something from Ghostbusters you name it and it served a very practical purpose you know I look back now and I realized it was probably Overkill because everything we do now is all remote and you know even if Chevrolet or you know some very wealthy uh Patron donated a vehicle I wouldn't outfit it with a whole bunch of stuff because we don't need to anymore but back then you know we did we had to drive that thing into hurricanes to get the data we just didn't have the setup that we do now and so it was very well equipped to do so however or and also but you know it's a however slash but we had the Isuzu that I had used since 1999 and we weren't just gonna you know I wasn't gonna just sell that or get rid of it or whatever it was paid for and so we decided to do something um rather bold and it really did lead to where we are now um I worked very closely with Jesse and John John Van Pelt from the storm study project and my good friend and colleague Eddie Smith um and my good friend Dr Brian Davis from University North Carolina Wilmington my old astronomy physics professor and when I say old I mean like he used to be not that he's old even though he is older now but you know what I'm saying um he is a group of us we all kind of brainstormed and um we came up with this idea that we would somehow transform and make use of the Isuzu as sort of a crash test dummy for hurricanes and my idea was to get it kind of retrofit with additional mounting points you know maybe some reinforcement and different places to put stuff you know maybe some mounts and Camera units uh these these scuba housings and I'll talk about this more in a moment but but I basically I had this light bulb go off like why don't we set up the Isuzu kind of like they do when they test airplanes and you've seen that old classic footage when they crashed I think it's like a DC-10 or something in the desert and they have cameras inside and they have dummies and they show it in slow motion in the explosion and the destruction of the plane and it's all for testing purposes and understanding aircraft aerodynamics engineering you name it they do the same of course with automobiles plenty of crash test video out there and I thought why don't we make the Isuzu our own virtual you know laboratory and you know and literal laboratory crash test hurricane dummy if you will and loaded up with cameras and I had to figure out how to do that and also attach weather instruments to it so I talked to several different uh people and companies to help me with this ah the first was Edwards Incorporated here in New Hanover County in Wilmington North Carolina a crane company they also do fabrication and other industrial related things again it's called Edwards Incorporated Edwards Inc and I went over and I met with I guess the project manager or the the local branch manager whatever he is his title his name was Jamie Ezell met with him and I kind of toyed around with some different ideas and you know we want to get some things mounted on the Isuzu welded to it bolted to it that we could Mount things on you know and to to get it ready rigged up if you will to leave out in a hurricane and put equipment on it and whatever happens happens who cares uh and so he was kind of like yeah that could be interesting you know it's kind of the opposite of what was happening in some people's minds about tornadoes remember at some point in the mid 2000s a couple of guys got this idea to armor and reinforce their vehicles and drive them into tornadoes which I still don't understand I mean hurricanes are bad enough but you know I wanted to kind of you know as 180 degrees for me I wanted to leave the vehicle and let it be the crash test dummy not me you know I wasn't going to be the dummy I didn't and Jesse and John and Eddie no no no no no so met with Jamie Iselle we came up with some ideas and uh um a few designs you know probably in Photoshop or something and tossed it around and you know kind of put it on the back burner um and then I talked to a company out in Nevada I believe it was Reno that um that made scuba diving housings I had ordered uh one from them way back in 1999 2000 somewhere around there that I used in Hurricane Gordon if you remember in the year 2000 episode uh I talked about that that I had this camera housing uh it's like a scuba diving housing without the electronics that comes with it it was just the shell and you know we didn't have GoPros back then and so I wanted my video camera my Sony digital video camera to be protected so I could shoot hurricane video outside of whatever vehicle I was in without the camera getting wet no duh it was like a I needed to solve that problem and so they sent me this uh this camera housing which by the way I still have that it's in my garage I ought to I want to auction that off for something someday or give it to the years top Patron or something that's a good point but I just thought of that I actually still have that believe it or not I really do um so uh in fact I'll post a picture of it as a link when I post this onto patreon so you can at least see it you'll see what I'm talking about anyhow got in touch with this company in in 2004 and yeah you remember me and oh yeah okay and you know the crazy guy wanting to film hurricanes with you know and I said can you make me um it may be a smaller version and just and build them custom for me where all it is is literally the the shell this protective fiberglass or whatever the heck they're made out of that has the special acrylic lens or opening in the front it's not glass but and maybe it is but you know just custom make me four of them with no electronics in them at all because the electronics is what you would hook up your high-end like Jacques Cousteau National Geographic BBC underwater filming mechanism you know your ten thousand dollar video camera or probably more than that you would hook this up through a bunch of different wires and connectors so that you could control stop start Focus Zoom you name it from the edges of these these housings see and I didn't need all that I just needed the protective case like what you get now with a GoPro looks like something came out of a Cracker Jack box doesn't it it does and the company said yeah and they gave them to me at a very reasonable uh cost I think it was like three hundred dollars total for all four of them and then I bought four hi eight Sony video cameras off of um probably outpost.com or somebody back then I don't think I was ordering from B H Photo just yet but who knows um I love the b h um and that was how we were going to do it the the vehicle would have cameras on top and then uh maybe one inside again to film A hurricane's wrath from the vehicle and we would stick the vehicle on the beach front somewhere not like right out on the beach like that that red Jeep during Hurricane Dorian or whatever it was I don't mean sitting right on the sand but you know you leave the vehicle behind maybe anchor it down and you have the anemometer and all this kind of stuff kind of like what we got now but in an SUV that was the idea so um that was what I wanted to do and it slowly took shape and so um I worked with John and his marketing skills were excellent like I said he got us that mobile threat net stuff from Barren weather services and he got in touch with Pelican and the storm case people that's the brand name um Pelican you know I don't know maybe I know Pelican bought storm case I think storm case was from hardig h-a-r-d-i-g-g and I think Pelican bought them a number of years ago but anyhow John got in touch with the storm case folks storm case was literally the brand name for these military spec cases that the military uh obviously photographers film people you know anything you needed to move uh Airline ship whatever with a protective hard case hardig and Pelican were the go-to sources in fact some of these pelican cases and or the storm cases were so popular then I remember seeing one of the ones that we actually used in those early days on that hit show on Fox 24. remember that about Jack Bauer uh kind of a you know what we know now as um they got that Jack Ryan uh with um John Kaczynski whatever his name is um the guy from The Office Well Jack Bauer of course Keith there's Kiefer Sutherland and I remember they actually had a pelican or I keep saying Pelican it was a storm case in one of the episodes of 24 and whatever so John got his hands on some of those the the hearted Corporation donated them and um we started working on it and I got my really good friend uh that I had grown up with um in New Bern his name is Jason um we grew up together he was a science guy I was too weather geek you name it he was computers and math and he had uh a degree at this point this is 2004 and so he has a degree in computer engineering or computer science or something and I believe he had a masters at this point from University of Washington uh you'd think if he was my best friend and ended up being the best man at my wedding that I would know these details but I don't but I do know that he is a programmer and that's what matters here okay and he worked for SAS Institute in Cary North Carolina still does a statistical analysis company SAS means statistical analysis software and um so you know I talked to him I said all right so we got these arm Young anemometers um that we're using I had two of them at this point the one from the Isuzu back in the day and then we had one for the Chevy Tahoe and I said can we come up with a way for you to talk to I need you to write a program basically in Windows you know for a Windows laptop that can talk to the arm young anemometer and the Davis pressure sensor it's actually a Davis weather monitor too the little console um because the day the uh the arm young stuff is extremely expensive still is and so we had an arm young anemometer which was like the one we were using back then was about eight hundred dollars and the Davis console was like 200 or something and it had temperature pressure humidity and anyway we wanted high-end wind data and the Davis console was very reliable for pressure you know it had enough of an accuracy that it was very good and so basically basically I said uh can you um create a program for us to talk to those instruments log the data create averages Etc and then pump it out to our website where we can display it in an interface on a web page live weather data and integrate our webcam that we're doing remember we were working with Sprint since 2001 and now we were able to send a webcam image to the website every you know minute or so and you know we thought we were pretty you know pretty in the game here you know this is pretty high-tech stuff for 2004. and in fact the webcam image we could do it up to uh I think it was like 360 by 240. pretty good you know we're getting closer to 640 by 480 and um and you know so that's what I did I went to Jason I need you to write a program that'll collect all this stuff the webcam image the win date of the pressure data and display it on a web page for us that we can put on hurricane track.com can you do that and he said okay I'll see what I can do and uh he did and so we worked on that during the summer I would take him equipment he lives up in the Raleigh area of North Carolina and that's what we did all during the early part of 2004 in the hurricane season waiting you know kind of waiting for hurricanes um you know we did the Lowe's hurricane fairs as well uh all around the country uh John and I would go to some Jesse and I would go to some Mike Farrow and I would go to some you know it was just it was business as usual and a lot of people were really paying attention to the world of hurricanes it was you know really the beginning of uh 3G everybody was getting you know close to having smartphones we had color screens on our Sanyo bar phones our Samsungs we were still three three years away from the first iPhone but we're getting there you can send pictures you can send little crappy videos from your iPhone from your your bar phone because you had flip phones look like a clam you'd flip it open right they use those like in Breaking Bad If you've watched that series they're just all about that um I guess flip phones make for good burner phones but um and uh and then you have these bar phones which is like a solids you know one looks like a bar that's what they call them and I had a a Sanyo and um I remember it had a color screen and then you could take little horrible videos like 15 second videos that just looked terrible and you can take pictures uh and uh anyway so we worked on all this and we're you know waiting for the Hurricanes when when are we gonna have a hurricane and so that was you know the good side of all this that the season took so long to get going is that we had plenty of time to put all this stuff together uh and you know we did um so there we were we worked on it um John would come down and help me in Wilmington I would drive up to Raleigh Jesse and I would spend hours talking on the phone you know speculating on how we could do this what if we do that and just you know I would do testing of equipment I remember I went to Sam's Club this is a great story here I went to Sam's Club in fact this is why I and it just occurred to me now you know I talked about this that I will remember things even as I go along in the the storyline will get interrupted as I remember a detail and this is one of those times um we had all this equipment I think Jason was you know close to finishing uh this is probably sometime in July he was close to finishing the program and we needed a place to store the laptop the Data Logger the battery the big AGM marine battery that would power all this stuff the wires the inverter you know the electronics where are you going to keep all this in the Isuzu you know because you got to protect it because water is going to come in we're going to leave it at the you know in the ocean front so to speak and surge is going to come in and you know we got to have it last as long as possible and we got to protect that equipment and so I had the you know I was on the phone with John I remember I was on the phone I'm like why don't I go to Sam's and buy one of those big coolers and you seal that up and they're supposed to be you know not airtight but I mean I guess enough so that that should protect everything right and then we could use the valve that they have on the cooler to let all the water out when your ice melts to run the wires into and then we use this putty stuff to kind of seal it off you know and and make it as protected as possible from any water that gets into the Isuzu and he's like yeah yeah it's a good idea so I ran over to Sam's and you know you got to remember to brag a little bit I had all the funding I could possibly want from Lowe's and Sprint you know and we didn't waste any money but I had plenty of r d money it was great you know not a million dollars or anything don't think it was that crazy but you know we could test things and if they didn't work it was not a a total like oh man we're out of money what are we gonna do um we were well funded and so that was a plus so I ran to Sam's and I bought a big old blue and white cooler I don't know it's just one of those giant party coolers uh plastic you know like a real nice one I don't remember who made it doesn't matter not a styrofoam cooler obviously but a big like you're gonna put it out and go tailgating with it you're gonna bring it to the picnic and fill it with ice and throw you know 40 cans of soda and beer in there um uh I lived at the time in a neighborhood that had two pools uh you know like a fitness center Recreation Area it's called Magnolia greens and uh I took the cooler drove it over to the pole you had to have this key fob to get in and they got security cameras there and you know whatever right so this is great this is so funny I took a um uh a piece of uh paper towel or toilet paper or something and um back when those things existed readily available haha um and uh years from now when someone listens to this podcast they're gonna go what did he mean by that oh anyhow um I put some I think it was Bounty like a sheet of bounty towel at the bottom of the cooler because that was going to be my test if the towel wasn't wet because Bounty paper towels are very good at wicking up moisture if they if it wasn't wet the one sheet then my test worked and what was my test going to be my genius idea was to put the cooler in the pool just just put it in the pool don't throw it in just slide it in the pool it'll float out and then I would jump on top of it and try to submerge it you know put all my weight on it I probably weigh paid 180 185 back then uh this is before it started getting real heavy and all that and I was working on it and um that's yeah that's big enough okay I can sink that sucker and you know stand on top of it in the shallow end of the pool and maybe for five minutes and see if it sprung a leak you know open it up after I'm done take it out and see if the paper towel is wet this was my genius idea uh and so the it's too bad that there's no way I could have gotten the surveillance video from the pool from the fitness center there so I put the cooler and you know where this is going I put the cooler in the pool and it kind of listed over to one side you know it's not perfectly balanced or whatever so it lists over that's what they call that a ship will list back and forth right so it lists over to kind of one side and it floats away it's floating away there's nobody out there it's just me it's probably 9 9 30 at night in the middle of the summer and I look around there's nobody around like all right got my bathing suit on and I jump on top of it not like a cannonball or something dumb I just kind of jumped out on it and I tell you what the the fact that I'm here today is a miracle because that thing like shot out from under me I went under and it went up into the air and as I came up the cooler fell and it landed in the water just millimeters from my Noggin and had it bonked me on the head it probably would have knocked me out and I would have drowned True Story I mean absolutely just a St and like okay it was just like thank goodness nobody was around to see that and uh I thought one day I'll tell this story in a podcast episode no just kidding but it really was like whoo okay well that didn't work so I dragged it over to the shallow shallow end like the the uh where the little kids can go and I sat on it and it was very very difficult because of its buoyancy with even my 180 185 pounds to get it to sink um and uh I finally got it to do so and yes it got water in it and it just it wasn't going to work you know because it wasn't designed I understand that there's a certain uh industry standard for how waterproof something is you know we know about that now more than ever with our work going forward but I didn't know it back then it was all trial and error so hey guess what we had a cooler if we ever needed it I told John yep didn't work the tile got wet you know it didn't fill up the cooler but this this probably isn't going to work um we need to come up with something else and then I said and this is where this happened hey you know the um those Pelican kick I keep saying Pelican because it is Pelican now Pelican bottom like I said I said you know those storm cases we're using those little ones because John had gotten us like a briefcase size when I still have that even to this day um and uh whatever I said you know don't they make like a real big version of that kind of like a big cooler and they are whatever that protocol is for you know water tightness right a certain um uh water you know resistance to a certain depth for a certain amount of time uh like an what is that the the IP value or there's some value for that I can't remember what it is ISO I think is what it's called uh anyhow and he was like oh yeah duh yeah that's a great idea and so he got in touch with hardig and that's how we got the big storm cases and they sent us several of them and we were ready and so that's what happened and we're getting towards the end of July no tropical activity to speak of just a few you know random things here and there tropical wave might develop whatever I'm blogging about it on the website uh at hurricane track.com or what we now know is blocking um and we had this other really big idea that we were gonna do starting in 2004. we decided that it was time to start moving towards live coverage we couldn't quite do it yet the bandwidth wasn't there the technology wasn't there just yet it was if it was there we weren't aware of it I'll just say that um but we did want to at least do the next best thing and that was to start recording what are called look lives in the business one of those uh we call them video updates that's actually what we call them um you know where you set the camera if somebody holds it whatever and you do a hey good evening everybody Mark zeddeth here and I'm on the Outer Banks it's 7 pm and you tell people who what when where why a couple minutes whatever and you upload that and remember we don't have YouTube like we do now I think YouTube just started out that year um and it was extremely cumbersome to do this you know you had to record it on a digital video camera what's called a DV cam capture it on a laptop with a FireWire cable digitize it to your laptop then save it maybe in a program to compress it down to probably 320 by 240 or something like that the video size get the bit rate low enough um you know the bandwidth the the file size and then use FTP which is file transport protocol to upload that to my server and then I got to go to my web page and put a link to it and then there's no way to tell everybody you know you have to just like now of course you can just do everything live but now if you post something on Twitter and you know like me you got 30 plus thousand people following you you know certain amount of people that are constantly engaged they know about it they get notified or whatever there's no way to do that you could say well you could have had an email marketing campaign but you know that's the problem back then you did all this and it would take like 45 minutes just to get a a 90 second clip on my website but we were bound and determined to do that and in fact the very first video update that we did in the field if you will was from one of the Lowe's hurricane fairs in Virginia Beach Virginia John and Jesse and I all three were there and we used it as an opportunity to like make history and it's out there somewhere in The Ether of the internet that video is out there somewhere the very first one where we were like hey good afternoon everybody Mark zeddeth here and I'm John Van Pelt hey I'm Jesse bass and um and we're here in Virginia Beach and blah blah blah blah that was done in the early summer of 2004 and we posted that like 45 minutes later to the website and we wanted to do that during hurricanes these quick clips that we could post online even if we just did two or three throughout the entire hurricane you know we felt like that would be a big Leap Forward and so we were ready for that and I mean we were we were armed we were you know loaded for Bears they say for the 2004 hurricane season and we were just waiting for something to happen so there we were ready to go it's now the end of July and uh the Isuzu was progressing we weren't quite ready yet we had taken it to Edwards they began the fabrication to add some things to it some reinforcements Up on the Rooftop inside this platform on the top um and whatever you know the the process began at the very end of July like the last third of July of 2004. and the program was done from Jason he wrote an interface on the website we called it hurt wind h-i-r-t for Hurricane intercept research team that was our group name and the wind you know it's like project so and so whatever this was hurt wind it was the wind program primarily because wind data to me was the most important aspect of what I wanted to collect and as I've learned over the years the pressure data is at least as important and in some circles uh pressure data might be even more important but we'll address that on a later date but everything was ready the interface was there the webcam was embedded into the page it was this beautiful um interface this you know graphical user interface or GUI web interface that people could go to at Hurricane track.com and see everything and it was almost live you know the weather data would update every minute the webcam would update every minute it with an image I mean that was pretty darn good for 2004 and we were at least one of the only people to have it if not the only people to have it especially something that was publicly available now you have weather flow and the weather underground and Earth cams and you name it it's out there but back then this was big and it was purposefully set up for Hurricane observation and research and it would take the place of us having to be there once it was ready and that's where I will end this episode once it was ready that was the key it's got to be ready before you can deploy it and so you know the question was would time run out and we get a hurricane before the hurricane landfall project and its vehicle the debut of the hlp hurricane landfall project Isuzu Rodeo sacrificed to the hurricane Gods vehicle would it be ready in time for the first hurricane and Beyond and that's where I'll leave the Cliffhanger for you you'll have to tune in next week to find out all right so there you go we're all the way up now uh hopefully the uh the anticipation is just killing you and from here of course we jump into the Hurricanes the big Onslaught that began at the very end of July and wouldn't end until the end of September in terms of landfalls and then they kept going after that just out in the Atlantic but we will get to all of that and that's what I'm going to do over these next several weeks as we close out season one of stories from the hurricane Highway uh we will be focused on the rest of 2004 and that'll get us into you know the remainder of March into April through April and then the first part of May I'll have a um like an ending final episode that kind of ties everything together and what to look forward to when we start this up again in December so you know that's the plan that's what we're going to do this will be in the off season as I've mentioned before a December through May podcast series exclusively for the most awesome people in the world and that is the people that support this project currently and as long as far back as 15 16 years ago and some of you yes have been with me for that long you're the ones that make this possible and so this is my gift to you so thank you so much all right well that'll wrap it up for this Edition and this journey these few miles down the hurricane Highway this has been stories from the hurricane highway I am Mark suddath for Hurricane track.com as always thank you so much for tuning in to this I'll have another one as we look into what happened once the Hurricanes began next week