Stories From The Hurricane Highway Season 1 Episode 5 Transcript - 1999 Part 1/2
Note: This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.
hello and Happy New Year to you mark set with hurricane track.com here with another episode another chapter whatever you want to call it it is time for stories from the hurricane Highway this is chapter four the year 1999 okay this is gonna be the first of several uh chapters where there's going to be sub chapters I mean this is this is basically be part one so that's what I'll label it as and that is because 1999 was a gargantuan milestone in my career and in this metaphoric Journey along the so-called hurricane Highway we had a lot that went on in 1999 and so instead of just talking for two hours or three hours or whatever it takes to get this year done 21 years ago now um I'll break it up into three episodes so this is you know part one if you will or three parts whatever all right so 19.99 a lot that year I tell you it's hard to believe it's been 21 years since the beginning of 1999 but that's what time does it flies doesn't it especially when you're having fun I guess or when you're successful or doing what you love it tends to move along much faster and here we are so uh looking back 21 years ago there was a lot of progress that had been made of course my career started in 1995 right after graduation from UNC Wilmington my map business taking off I'm now Distributing them uh all around the Carolinas from Charlotte over to Portsmouth Virginia uh with TV stations down to Charleston South Carolina the radio business in cumulus broadcasting in the Wilmington Market with the Curtis Media Group in Raleigh and we had project impact with FEMA and my work with Emergency Management and learning and continuing to expand my knowledge base about not just hurricanes and what they do but the Emergency Management side of things mitigation and how to talk to people about preparedness I mean all of that was growing at an exceptional pace and lucky for me I was young and and I'm still young but I was much younger 20 years younger so it was a lot easier to absorb all of that it really was and like a like a child you know they say that they're like sponges well um I don't think he ever truly grew up yeah Walt Disney proved that others did as well um but you know Disney is definitely the manifestation of you never grow up and when you're younger and all that energy is there it is easier to just absorb absorb absorb and that's what I really wanted to do at the early part of my career is learn as much as I could and then teach others from that process so everything was going great and 1999 would be as I have teased many times here already a momentous year on many levels and so what we'll do in part one of 1999 is we're going to go all the way up through about mid-july or so of 1999 and then cut it off and next week we'll pick up from there all right so um one thing that happened at the end of 1998 in the early 1999 I had interest from the Army Corps of Engineers who attended this big meeting that we had if you remember in the last chapter in 1998 we had this big project impact meeting in downtown Wilmington and there was a couple guys there from the Army Corps of Engineers the Wilmington district and they spoke to me briefly it was just a quick candid conversation about a project that they were working on with the state of North Carolina and you know maybe we can talk about it sometime a little further well that further happened um in early 1999 we had a meeting and they presented me with what at the time and even to this day is one of the single biggest projects um of my career it really was and here's the deal they wanted me with my uh enthusiasm my energy my new perspective on things whatever whatever this Mark suddath brand they wanted that to be translated into a project as part of what they call their hurricane evacuation restudy and what that is is the Army Corps of Engineers works with an engineering firm in the state of North Carolina and they do a hurricane evacuation study and then they do a re-study about every 10 years maybe more they produce Maps they produce what are called clearance times they work with Emergency Management it's a big deal it's got millions of dollars of funding and there's a lot of people involved with it and this is what goes on excuse me behind the scenes you knew inevitably I'd get a cold while trying to produce one of these and I'm coming off the tail end of a cold and so bear with me as I keep my throat from getting too dry and Scratchy with the cup of water we got here so anyway um the background like what the normal what the what the public didn't see was what goes on behind the scenes you know that these studies when evacuations get done um there's a lot that goes into that it's not just a couple of people in a back room that say okay these are the zones these are the highways and this is how long it'll take people to get out we think no no no it's much more involved in that and I became an integral part whereas the Brits say an integral um an integral part of uh I think the Brits say that but whatever I became part of that process and they invited me in to this project and it would mean that I would produce as an end product a print map set of all 21 North Carolina counties Coastal counties storm surge Maps uh and an online version as well a digital version in the online world because now in 1999 more and more people are online the.com boom is really taking off you name it you know the Y2K is coming you know that was going to be a big problem everybody thought you know personal computers were much more readily available so forth and so on so my task was to develop a public awareness campaign and introduce North Carolina coastal residents to the concept of storm surge Maps what they mean how to mitigate against storm surge damage how to approach evacuation understanding evacuation because we evacuate because of storm surge 99 of the time other people evacuate for other reasons but in a planning scenario they issue evacuations not for wind but for Surge and period I mean that's what they do all the planners around the coastal United States that's what that's all about we evacuate from you know the threat of water so they wanted me to kind of spearhead this project and being part of this project impact initiative we would work together to have some federal money from the Corps of Engineers Federal money from FEMA from Project impact and then I would go get the private sector to help out through sponsorships and like a cooperative and so there it began so early January February whatever it was 1999 we hatched this project and I mean I was like blown away I couldn't believe it this was the opportunity of a lifetime four years after graduating college man are you kidding it was amazing and I got to meet with some seriously high level people you know from government Corps of Engineers National Weather Service National Hurricane Center people up at the state of North Carolina and the geographic information systems main office up in Raleigh you know State officials and you know here I am again just four years after college and it's just lighting up it was incredible so I had to do a tremendous amount of research um and that's where you put all of your college training to good use and presumably even you know high school training where you have to do research papers and all of that you know when people go when am I ever going to use this in the real world this was it and so I put all of that to use and really buckled down and started learning how I'm going to put this all together so we worked out a contract um with myself and an engineering firm down in Tallahassee called PBS and J post Buckley shernigan Shu and Jernigan or something like that sorry p s and J post Buckley shoe and Jernigan and they would pay me because they were already a contractor with the Army Corps of Engineers and for me to become a contractor and literally would take an act of Congress and we didn't have all the time in the world so you know I became a subcontractor of PBS and J and that way the money could flow so here's what I was able to do I after learning from 1996 97 98 and into early 1999 but really those three years 96 97 98 learning from Dan Higgins you've heard me mention him many times the gentleman that owned um Higgins offset and thermography now I think by 99 he changed the name to Higgins Printing and Graphics but it's a print shop I learned enough from Dan that I used some of my early funding that came in from PBS and j under my contract to buy drum roll again second week in a row we've had a drum roll um I bought at the time the greatest home computer that money could buy and that was a brand new fully loaded top of the line Power Mac G3 blue Macintosh computer um it was like three grand 3 500 something like that and I mean it was a Workhorse I mean the only thing better was silicon Graphics like they used an industrial Light and magic or at a lot of the TV stations back in the day they would run silicon Graphics workstations to do the powerful 3D animations you know back in the 90s and early 2000s and whatever so I bought a power Mac G3 and the the software that I needed um to do the maps in this project Adobe Photoshop Adobe pagemaker Adobe Illustrator but and this is so key I had a vision of how I wanted to represent um and visualize and and demonstrate to the public what storm surge is that I had a revolutionary idea in the early 2000s 1999 and the 2000s you know that decade a lot of talk of decades lately the idea of home computer Graphics was really starting to take off and there were some decent 3D Graphics programs out there and I got my hands on one on the Mac it was called Bryce b-r-y-c-e and it was like version four is it called Bryce four and it was a 3D modeling program and what you did with it is you created 3D models duh right okay it's very similar to what the film studios were using television production companies were using to create 3D logos for commercials for television and 3D animation for video games and films um there was a higher end version called Maya m-a-y-a and they would use that with some other sophisticated stuff at industrial Light and Magic so I was a Level under that it was you know a pro but still consumer so they call that prosumer level uh 3D program called Bryce four and with that I wanted to be able to create water and put real objects in the water and show how they interacted with each other and try to show what storm surge was and the Corps of Engineers and all the project people I constantly had to keep them updated you know because we're using tax dollars now so you know I always had to have progress reports and whatever so once a week we'd get together and I would explain with storyboards and diagrams and Photoshop you know mock-ups of what my ideas were and these guys were just absolutely blown away it was as if they had hired James Cameron or Steven Spielberg or George Lucas and I know that that sounds really magnanimous but bear with me they got their hands on the right guy you understand because I was able to take my vision and turn it into something that would be revolutionary that literally nobody had ever done before I had that opportunity and they were going to be part of that the US Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District project impact and so forth and so on it trickled down through the business Community everybody knew about it it was you know Mark was in charge of something big Okay so as old Spider-Man says there's at least his uncle told him with great power comes great responsibility when you say you're going to do something like that you darn well better do it so there's a lot of pressure on me now at the same time we also had another bun in the oven as they say my wife was pregnant with what would be our second child luckily he was not due till May so I had time but I still had a toddler at home Nathan remember so he's about almost two years old now and I do work at home I worked at home ever since I walked away from um working for the man as we call it you know I've always worked at home hurricane Maps Enterprises my business and eventually hurricane track.com that's always been a home-based business which becomes challenging under you know you can just imagine when you start having kids holy cow that notwithstanding I I plowed ahead and I came up with these ideas okay so that's January February in March I started tinkering around with the idea well the Corps of Engineers wants a website uh and an interactive version of all of this I need a website for me uh for my hurricane stuff and I looked at all different domain names and settled on I think that it was March 20th uh 1999 I should have looked it up but it's real close to there I settled on at Network Solutions which is a domain name registrar hurricane track.com and I thought that's perfect because there was already like a weather track and there was a storm track and I thought well why not hurricane track it's it means a lot of things you know it's kind of like you know stock watch or you know Sports track or whatever it just made sense and it it could mean more than one thing it's about tracking hurricanes it's also a way to keep up with news and eventually what I would do you know with blogging and and what we know now is this the whole social media Universe well that came into fruition in March of 1999 I was online the very first iteration um was hurricane track.com in 1999 and it was an offshoot of an earlier website that I had bought that was it was okay it was called hurricane99.com but that was temporary that was back um well you know what let me think come on let my brain catch up right I bought both of them I forgot sorry I had to think about it there was a uh um a message board type site called storm99.com and it was owned by Palm Beach interactive and the the electronic version or the online version was called go PBI and it was part of the Palm Beach Post I believe and it's called storm99.com and they actually had a storm 98 and a storm 97 so now I remember it's like sitting down with a therapist talking to you guys that recall your childhood please Mario there you go um and these memories start coming back um that's what it was it was storm 99 I'm sorry hurricane99.com just for one year obviously 19.99 but I bought the domain name hurricane track.com that year as well all right so let's just there you go so that was all set up I had a very basic site um it was pretty cool at the time and the idea was to do what we now know as blogging and I called it um my commentary you know like a hurricane discussion and commentary or something like that by Mark suddath and so I would write a few paragraphs about whatever is going on in in the world of hurricanes and if it was the springtime uh you know it would be you know forecast from Dr William Gray you know he was alive back then in in Colorado State University was the premiere oh what are they saying you know that was what everybody talked about so that's what I did you know now we call it blogging um man if I had only like trademarked or whatever the concept of blogging and I also wanted some really cool online Maps you know we had printed Maps but I also I've got this online world with hurricane99.com and eventually what would just become hurricane track.com you gotta have Maps so what did I do I turned to my best friend from grade school and from my childhood a gentleman by the name of Jason sakoski who uh he has his whole other life right so how do you boil this down um he he went into computers and uh went to move that West uh by about seventh grade we stayed in touch stayed thick as thieves I would go out to Mill Valley um it's interesting because I was out there in the West in California in the mid to late 80s visiting Jason and we would literally run into people we would never know it that would shape the future of Silicon Valley in in Mill Valley and Marin County San Francisco we were there and that's where Jason went to school he went to Tamale Place tamale Pius whatever it's called High School Tamil players or whatever um I think it's Tamil Pius and then he went to UC San Diego and then University of Washington he's got a master's degree and he landed fast forwarding many many years in Raleigh Cary North Carolina area specifically carry where SAS is located statistical analysis software it's a company it's a statistical uh software company called SAS Institute a privately held company um kind of like the Microsoft of the East and Jason landed a job there in 1997 I believe so there you go I said hey I got this website I want to put some maps on there and I want to make them cool what can we do so we designed with my work on the base map and this is a true story I mean there's we can go back to the web archive and I mean it's all there we designed what we now have you know when we know through Google you know pop-ups and mouse overs we had that in 1999 we just didn't know what to do with it you know what I mean like again if we had patented it wow what a different world it would have been the idea I wanted a map that you could Mouse over and when you hit a certain Target what's called a hot spot on the map something would pop up so as an example the hurricane symbol hurricane so and so located here you got a little symbol on there and you Mouse over it you have a little window that would pop up right next to your cursor and it would give you the lat long the wind speed and you know the latest statistics on that advisory plus if you moused over the forecast which back then went out only to three days uh you'd get the 72 hour plots you know whatever if you Mouse over Wilmington it would tell you Wilmington's that long and it would also tell you how far you were from the center we had all of that for real and it went live in 1999 on the website Interactive zoomable clickable we didn't have street level with tiles like you do now with Google because that didn't exist but we had maps that were state of the art beyond anything that anybody else had everybody else's Maps were static jpegs or gifs or whatever hours were interactive and for some of you you might remember that that was us and it was wildly popular it really was right out of the gate so we'd started working on that in the spring of 1999 while I was also working on this Corps of Engineers project and then another thing happened that was just like again these pivotal moments that are just so important I finally in April of 1999 went to the National Hurricane conference which was located that year in Orlando it would bounce around between New Orleans sometimes they would have it in Austin Texas and then back in Orlando the National Hurricane conference has been around since I think at least the early 70s started from a small group of people in the wake of Hurricane Camille really and the Civil Defense era and it's the nation's oldest most prestigious um I mean it's it's a now there's a lot of conferences out there but in 1999 it was pretty much it uh and you would have like 3 000 attendees it was incredible and the thing about it was when you went to the National Hurricane conference you could sign up to do these courses and one of them was a training course from FEMA called hurricane planning and it was a two-day 16-hour course and he would learn from the National Hurricane Center forecasters and you got to remember that to me the names at the bottoms of the discussions and of the forecast Franklin Bevin Stewart Pash Avila or Avila you know Mayfield those were rock stars it might as well have said you know McCartney linen Star right you know um they were rock stars to to those of us in the hurricane world and the fact that I could go sit in a class and learn from these rock stars these Legends was Giant but here's why I my experience was different here's why when I was at the conference I wasn't just an attendee you know I paid my registration and I went and I learned but these guys from the Corps of Engineers helped to Foster introducing me to various key people in the business I believe Jerry Gerald who was the director in 99 I think it was Jerry Jarrell um Max Mayfield Ed Rappaport they were all you know Bevin Stewart pasch Dr Pash Chris lanzi yeah he was young and just moving into the the whole thing back then um we went to dinner let me let me just show you how important I was um to their system in 1999 the Corps of Engineers guys that I worked with arranged for me to go to dinner with the National Hurricane Center staff and I rode in Dr Richard pasch's car and we all piled in this big old Lincoln Town Car or whatever it was may have been a Cadillac and we drove me Chris Lindsay um uh Dr Pash a couple other people I can't remember several of us piled in and we went to some Indian restaurant uh Indian cuisine in Orlando and if you know me you're like oh poor Mark uh and and again I was absolutely like it's like being kidnapped by Aerosmith or whatever not kidnapped that doesn't sound right but you know what I mean it's like wow are you freaking kidding me and that's how important I was because I was being groomed to work with these guys by the Corps of Engineers who all worked with these people themselves everything was related I didn't realize that FEMA the Corps of Engineers The Weather Service you know the National Hurricane Center these are all related everybody's in the same family and I was learning that so I got to learn things and be on the inside I wasn't just another guy who paid his his conference fee and went I was able to you know and remember too I'm also wanting to quote Chase hurricanes and I've already been in a few already uh Bertha Fran and Bonnie and so I would talk about that and I remember the conference was like five days long and one of the days we went out to lunch and we were on our way back and myself and Stacy Stewart you know forecaster Stewart you see that on the bottom of the discussions we're on our way back I don't remember where we ate Red Lobster somewhere uh right there in on International Drive in Orlando and I was asking him you know he was you know so you want to chase hurricanes or whatever we started talking about it and I asked him for some advice on how to get wind data from a vehicle that one day I hope to have a vehicle and I want to put an anemometer on it and I want to capture Data Drive it into the eye wall and you know he's like oh well that's dangerous oh yeah I know it's dangerous but I still want to do it well okay so he said the best way to get data from a vehicle is to put the anemometer on the back corner so and then and then aim that into the wind aim the rear of the vehicle into the wind with the anemometer about nine feet above ground level if you can do it uh with the with the anemometer exposed to the wind that way don't put it above or in the middle like these TV stations do you know for show uh because the wind will come up over the windshield and you get turbulence and you're not getting an accurate an accurate wind reading and you know they prefer 10 meter win readings and I was going to give them if I could six to nine feet above ground level and just that advice alone just walking across the parking lot from Red Lobster back over to the conference place I think it was at the Omni Rosen or whatever in Orlando that was gold you know to get advice from the forecaster himself uh you know it's just stories like that that I will never ever forget so I learned a lot I took the courses you know I got my certification the Emi Emergency Management Institute gives you these professional development hours and I got to learn from the best of the best on the planet and and kind of get in on this Inner Circle and before it was all over I remember late in the afternoon as the conference was winding down we were all out at the pool hanging out people were just chatting it up whatever and I was a little bit of a Wallflower hard to believe with my personality now right you know it wasn't real sociable I didn't know a lot of people and these guys from the Corps of Engineers um one of them's name is Alan and I can't remember the other guy's name I'm terribly sorry but Alan and the other gentlemen they're like Mark come here I want to introduce you to somebody he's going to be the future director of the National Hurricane Center it's Max Mayfield So they introduced me to Max and that's where it started April 1999 that's when I met Max Mayfield and from here on out Max enters the story right in my life in profound hugely important ways so when I left the conference and returned to North Carolina uh I was a new man it was like a religious experience you know my brain was filled with so much information so much inspiration so much new knowledge and you know just different ideas of what I wanted to do um it was just it was killing me it was like I couldn't sleep at night I was just filled to the brim with excitement about working in the world of hurricanes in a way that nobody has ever done before um I remember we had like there was a hospitality suite and we would all go up there and chit chat and it was mostly the Hurricane Center guys and I would just sitting there yapping it up with them uh again Young Chris Lindsay and others I can't remember who I was there but just and everybody was embracing of my ideas you know nobody ever put me down and said you know get out of here kid you're just a geographer this is only open to meteorologists I will say this that comes later the road the hurricane highway is not always smooth and yes there were some bumps along the way we get to that in a couple of years but I digress in 1999 I was welcomed with open arms so uh we get to May and on May 10th my second son is born uh Nicholas we call him Cole for short c-o-h-l and you know your life changes again right now you got two kids and um uh the hurricane season begins my project is going along very well with the Corps of Engineers uh making frequent trips to Raleigh visiting the education building up in downtown Raleigh uh where the center for geographic information and Analysis is located meeting with all kinds of officials getting these files in what's called a vector format and if you know illustration and graphic design you know what that means and talk in the language you know gosh it was just so rewarding to use my four years of college and everything I learned and apply it you know in a project that was going to be so pivotal for North Carolina and my career okay it was just be and you don't know it while it's happening I mean sometimes you do sometimes you know that something is the start of something that'll it'll last forever but those moments you usually don't know when they're happening usually and that's one of them I didn't realize how big this would actually become so I plowed forward developed the project and it's interesting because a little side note there were those that opposed the project uh who would those people be real estate agents Chambers of Commerce didn't necessarily want the public to have these Maps because they thought that it would drive property values down and scare people from buying property along the coast our argument was you know to counter that we're going to educate people and we're going to do it in a way that's not Sensational it's going to be fact and science based using state-of-the-art technology to explain things in a way that will make people excited to learn and present that the information to them in a very Innovative fashion yet yeah well you know we have different meetings with people and and there were some serious reservations so just keep that in mind okay we did have a little bit of resistance it wasn't like a huge Groundswell where it was us versus them but there was some concern from the real estate community that publishing tens of thousands of these Maps readily available to people uh and and remember these were going to be giant pieces of paper 28 by 40 inches full color storm surge maps that show you where storm surge would most likely be the most severe Etc it's based off of computer models called slosh which stands for C Lake and Overland Surge from hurricanes as well as something called the maximum envelope of water and all these sophisticated modeling and whatever it's very complicated but the end result is a color-coded map Blue was you know category one flooding uh one and two yellow was category three so that includes blue and then red which includes blue and yellow is category four five in other words if you lived in a red area on the map a category four or five hurricane under the right conditions might put salt water in your property the blue meant it would only take a category one or in some cases a tropical storm and anyway so that's what the whole idea was and it had a little bit of resistance but only a little so just keep that in the back of your mind so moved along got the project ready and started printing up the maps um I got paid along the way way which was good and it was a good amount of money I think I bid something like thirty eight thousand dollars for the project which in 1999 dollars was like a hundred grand I mean honestly it was the most money I'd ever made and this was on top of um doing my regular tracking charts my maps with Portsmouth with Curtis Media Group with WCNC in uh Charlotte and wciv in Charleston I was still making that money too as well as the map I was producing in Wilmington with Wave radio and caymanless Broadcasting so you know I was doing all right and um so now we're into the summer hurricane season begins hurricane99.com is up and running doing great I'm posting these daily updates um I think it was discussion and commentary like I said I shouldn't I should look it up it's on the internet archive if you go to web archive if you Google that I think it's called Web archive or internet archive and put in hurricane track.com or hurricane99.com you should see some of the very first iterations of what the website looked like it's it's there but I did I did this discussion I would talk about you know like I do now boiling it down and well now of course I can do it in a 15-20 minute video but back then everything was typed out and so I tried to be succinct and well written and not too lengthy and you know uh to wordy and you know put it out there and and people loved it like right out of the gate they loved it and you we had a fairly busy season that year um it was supposed to be pretty active according to Dr Gray and his team at CSU uh um Noel Nino or anything like that we came out of the big El Nino of 97 in the early 98 and so 99 looked like it could be a fairly active year so now we're into July uh and um my project was nearing completion the maps were going to be out uh the goal was for them to be out in August and September slowly roll them out we had you know printed hundreds of thousands of these things divided them up around the different counties these storm surge maps and so it was a Herculean effort I mean it wasn't something simple believe me and so very early July mid July somewhere around there um and probably got one of my payments or whatever from PBS and J part of my contract I think we divided it into three payments an initial upfront payment a mid payment and then a payment when it's completed probably in December of 99 and I was like all right everything's going great I got all this advice I got some money coming in talked to my wife I got this kid two kids now whatever I'm like I don't have a vehicle remember that she's still driving around in the pink Hyundai and I got no vehicle uh and I'm like it's time to get a vehicle so uh I scraped together some money um well I don't say scrape because again I was doing okay um uh assembled my money looked at my funds whatever did a little research and went to um man I it just escapes me I think it was from a used car Place uh might have been DNE Dodge um I knew somebody from college or something it was some contact I had and I said you know I need an SUV but I can't afford something big it had like a Suburban or whatever uh what do you got and I think they had like a used um couple year old 96 I think it was the the year making model or the year it was a 96 Isuzu Rodeo and I don't remember how much it was at the time 13 000 or something it was a couple years old whatever and I test drove it it was a stick shift manual transmission lucky for me I knew how to drive one uh and I financed it I put a few thousand dollars down and I financed the rest there you go so uh Late July 1999 I finally got my hands on quote a Chase vehicle and that's yeah it's still not chasing you still intercept hurricanes but I had a vehicle I had a Chase vehicle and remember I had a name already picked out hurricane intercept research team that's what I was going to call me and anybody that wants to help so I got uh the local uh sign Place Fast Signs um to do a decal for me uh in vinyl like they do on race cars and it was rectangular in shape and very basic boom put it on the side of the car very early August all right now we're in a very early August my project is real close to completion especially for a few of the southeast counties and we have a very important meeting up in Dare County North Carolina along the outer banks with area coordinators Emergency Management officials Sandy Sanderson was the director up there at the time and the core was going to be there and some other officials and whatever so I had to go up there and do a presentation how things are going when it's going to be coming out you know making sure all the information is correct everybody's happy with it you know a lot of people got to sign off on it and I remember I drove that vehicle up there and I thought man I am I'm Batman I mean it did I felt like I had my Batmobile it was so cool to show up in my company vehicle and all it had was these you know decals on it that said hurricane intercept research team but I was ready you know we had the meeting and everything was great and I drove back and you know uh also I remember I had a cell phone uh finally in 1999 it was through um singular Singular Wireless I think is what it was called um and then eventually I think it got bought by or something Bell South Mobility DCS or whatever and the hurricane season was getting ready to kick in all right so here we are in early to mid August and you know I'm like all right talk to my wife I was like I gotta get some stuff and put it on this vehicle you know I can't afford the real high-end RM young anemometers that they have on the hurricane buoys you know that are like fifteen hundred dollars a pop but I gotta put something on there you know is that all right so we talked it over sure so I bought uh a Davis weather monitor 2 Weather Station a brand new weather station full weather station with the anemometer the rain bucket the little computer thing you know the little console and then I got like the roof rack on top of the Isuzu you could adjust it and then I went to Lowe's and I got a bunch of gray PVC pipe and some hose clamps and put together kind of like a Contraption for the lack of a better word um using pipes to at least have the anemometer on the roof so it was about six seven feet above ground level maybe higher maybe eight feet you know right in the middle not right where it should have been according to Stacy Stewart but you know it was something I had a weather station on the Isuzu permanently mounted I used like suction cups and a little tray thing to put the weather computer on and you know just I I was ready I had a Chase vehicle it was awesome and now I was waiting for the hurricanes and uh I was going to work with a couple of pretty cool people uh as my name got out there more you remember Jamie Arnold from the last chapter and Bonnie who's now the chief meteorologist at wmbf he was going to help out if he ever if you know if you ever have another hurricane down here again I'd love to help out that's what he said you know I didn't scare him away after Bonnie so he was available um there was a good friend of mine that I had met through Dan Summers office remember Dan Summers is the director of Emergency Management in New Hanover County and there was an intern there a gentleman by the name of Eddie Smith uh Eddie Smith was going to Appalachian State and he was going to go into public administration and Emergency Management perhaps maybe Town management management or something so he was doing an internship at Dan's office I knew a lot of people through project impact um you know my name was getting out there you know Mark was growing into this hurricane guy it was pretty cool you know and and now had a vehicle so it's like come on bring on the Hurricanes I'm ready and I got some money so I can go anywhere I want I can go to Florida you know and go to the Outer Banks and I don't have to stay in Wilmington maybe they'll stop hitting Wilmington all the time Fat Chance uh and and then as weird as it sounds I also had another person that was willing to help out my physics professor and astronomy Professor I took physics in astronomy at UNC Wilmington didn't do too well in physics I got a C I think I got a B in astronomy um just for the record but his name is Dr Brian Davis PhD and kind of looks like a wizard literally long hair uh like somebody right out of Lord of the Rings just great guy uh smart as you could ever imagine and he taught me the expression that I have since put on a t-shirt and it goes like this life's hard when you're stupid he taught me that back in 1999 I'll never forget it uh maybe earlier than that because I had him in College of course I graduated in 95 we stayed friends whatever and so he was like yeah I'd love to help because I remember now I'd go visit him from time to time for some advice um on different physics equations when it when it came to hurricanes and understanding sort of the mathematical side of things I would I would visit Dr Davis at his office at uh at UNC Wilmington so he and I stayed in contact even after I graduated so we had this kind of loose fit team you know Mark will run the thing whatever my name will be on it but we got guys that'll help out with Eddie with Dr Davis with Jamie and you know here we go and my buddy Jason would help out on the back end of things making sure that the website stayed up and that all my little maps and doohickeys and Technology on the website was working I mean it was pretty remarkable now we just needed the hurricanes and that is where I will leave you for tonight yeah you gotta have a cliffhanger and believe me when we go into the next section of this next week part two you're just not gonna believe it I say believe me you're not going to believe it it's true um so that's where I'll stop for tonight we're all the way up mid-august 1999 couple of sort of um pop culture trivia things for you it's mid-august 99 my world is going just a mile a second it's and you know we've talked about that my world is fantastic remember other things happening that was the first year of the show Survivor on CBS remember that water hold on also the very first time in America the Regis Philbin would host Who Wants To Be A Millionaire do you remember that I do that was all 1999 believe it or not and of course we have the Y2K thing coming up and that's later in you know December 31st right but that's all 1999 things were cooking you know like they say cooking with gas right um just when you hear what happens next and we get going with part two probably even have a part three after that so this will take up three Wednesdays here in the month of January um truly truly truly just 19.99 will be one of those years that definitely stands out uh as shining very bright amongst all the other um you know spanning more than two decades now so there you go um that is just about it I think I've covered everything up to this point again you know I hate to leave you on a cliffhanger but I think it's better that way you know we can break it up and we'll pick up where we left off next Wednesday and we will go from there with what happens next which is a couple of hurricanes and some other pivotal things you'll see if you don't already know the story I think you're going to be absolutely amazed all right hey look I really appreciate you tuning in to this and begin getting some feedback from you guys I appreciate that um I am going to just to talk about the technical side of this the podcast is available through patreon through the RSS feed and I have enabled that myself but you have to do it yourself as well if you know how to do that in the membership side but I can also make it real easy if you don't want it automated and you're not real concerned with that I'm going to put a link in the episode tonight's chapter on patreon to a web page where all of these will be available on Soundcloud as well so you know I want to make sure this is easy for you to listen to so there is a way to do it in patreon um within the app so that it just automatically downloads to your app player your your podcast player I don't really know much about that myself I use SoundCloud for a few of the podcasts that I listen to I just don't have a lot of time to listen to podcasts every day I'm busy making them but just letting you know I will put a link to a web page exclusively for you guys uh where you can get all these episodes one through four now and that'll never change that'll just keep growing as the months and years go by so look for that I'll put that in the um the patreon post uh well as soon as I'm done uploading it here in just a minute so again Happy New Year to all of you your support in 19 and I listen to that it's still in my brain in 2019 that's what I tried to say was the best ever it really was really grew a lot and um what we're gonna do in 2020 is just going to build on that we're gonna do even more uh and I got this new uh TV type series coming up the hurricane Highway that'll start and later this month the first episode will be ready uh probably gonna have eight episodes of that and again that's like a TV show instead of a two hour movie it'll be broken up into episodes and you're gonna love it it's absolutely gonna be the same but different I think you're really gonna like it uh and then of course we've got this podcast that'll be ever growing um and then you know it's January so that means we have less than five months now and it'll be hurricane season again but that's what we talk about outside of the podcast World on the hurricane outlooking discussion that's not what we do here anyway thanks as always for tuning in I do appreciate it more than you will ever know it's great to have you listening on your side keep the feedback coming I appreciate it and uh you know try to recruit some folks out there in your own world if you know people that would be interested in supporting what we're doing but also getting out of it what you get out of it tell them to sign up you know it's just a dollar a month and up I wish I could and make it free to everybody but I don't think enough people would support it if we did that it's just the way it goes I guess so you guys are part of something very special and you should Pat each other on the back yourselves for supporting something that's really making a difference we've done a lot with our small but very significant group of people hard to believe it's been going so strong since 1995 and I'm glad to share these stories with you and with that I'll wrap up another chapter here of stories from the hurricane Highway the year 1999 part one probably of three I am marks out of Hurricane track.com I'll talk to you again with part two next week