Stories From The Hurricane Highway Season 1 Episode 8 Transcript - The Year 2000
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Mark Sudduth of hurricanetrack.com here with another chapter of stories from the hurricane Highway thank you for joining me it is January 22nd 2020 and in this chapter we will examine the year 2000 a new century a new decade began uh now several years after I began my career I had been through five hurricanes now at this point and that would be Bertha Fran Bonnie Dennis and Floyd I had my hurricane Maps business uh well underway storm surge Maps were out I won the award from FEMA at the end of 1999 you would think that you know had I been a publicly traded company one of those startups and hey you know 1999 and 2000 that was the um Heyday of the dot-coms remember I do I had a.com I was hurricane 99.com in 1999 and that transitioned over to hurricane track.com in the year 2000 but had I been one of those publicly uh traded you know.com boom companies I would have been doing very very well probably been a billionaire you know back in the day that's how well things were going in my career and it's true and it's it's pretty remarkable I look back and I think about it and I talk about it on this series and uh you're privy to all of that you know like we've said many times or I've said there's no we well it was the other night when it was myself and Mike Farrell but this is very much like a book on tape if you think about it and um it's just a good way to reminisce about the past and now we're up to the year 2000 so we all survived the Y2K um I don't want to call it nonsense but there was no major meltdowns of nuclear power plants the grid didn't shut off it wasn't like the Matrix where everything just went to the toilet um you know we got through it so here we are in the year 2000 and I began uh to look ahead you know what was going to be next uh as I forged ahead in my career but both in the hurricane awareness business as well as in the hurricane intercepting business and the.com there with hurricane track.com what would happen with all of that so we begin in the year 2000 uh right where I you know left off and and from 1999 and the previous years they're building everything up and one of the big things that I wanted to do as you recall I talked about that I had this Isuzu Rodeo that I had purchased in 1999 that was purchased in July 99 I used it in hurricanes Dennis and Floyd um I talked about how that was on CNN and that amazing time there spent with Jeff Locke on CNN with the Davis weather station up on top of the Isuzu collecting wind data it was really neat and and but I wanted to make it better and I had some funding I sold some of these posters the hurricane Coast poster uh early days of crowdfunding and um I sold enough so that I had enough money to buy a new anemometer an anemometer is a wind gauge and that would be a big change for me something that I really was wanting to do a a much better job of and that was collecting data I was a geek a weather geek and I really wanted that wind data um so I I talked about in the year 1999 going to the National Hurricane conference for the first time spending some time learning from the forecasters there the scientists there one of them was Stacy Stewart forecaster Stewart as we call him and he gave me advice on how to collect wind data and I took that to heart so in the year 2000 I had enough funds to purchase one of these high-end scientific equivalent pieces of equipment you know you have hobby equipment prosumer equipment and then you have truly scientific level science grade top-notch very expensive equipment you have that in astronomy photography medical field Etc and the same certainly holds true in the world of meteorology and that company is RM young the arm young company out of Traverse City Michigan and they make these Precision pieces of equipment for temperature pressure wind readings environmental readings Etc and I got my hands on this RM young propeller-based anemometer it's about fifteen hundred dollars for one unit I think it's still roughly that even today and they are remarkable they use these anemometers on the hurricane buoys out in the Caribbean in the Atlantic the Gulf of Mexico elsewhere they're used in tornado research and in extreme environmental measurement conditions extreme cold extreme wind high durability I mean you don't go to the mall or as it stands now I guess the airport where Brookstone is I'm picking on Brookstone but you don't go buy these um at the airport while you're waiting to catch your next flight and bring it home to your kid as a gift these are Precision Instruments and I wanted one and I got one and I got the tracker that goes with it it's called The Wind tracker and that gives you the readout these things are all electrical based using uh tiny electric impulses that are generated by the Turning of the propeller and that sends a small impulse and it gets translated through the weather tracker the wind tracker into a readout you know that tells us miles per hour or knots or whatever the case may be you can set that on this little Gadget that you would Mount wherever some people Mount them on their Yachts people put them in um maybe like a uh at a like a marina so you have like the um the harbor Masters quarters maybe there's an anemometer and a wind tracker there um you know Weather Service offices maybe use them I think they use a different style but it's a high-end piece of equipment and I was very stoked to get it so that's exactly what I did I bought one and I mounted it up on the Isuzu and put the wind tracker inside the Isuzu up on the dashboard and had everything hardwired and voila with the flip of a switch I would have live wind readings from a true high-end weather station at least for wind and I was very very excited about that and I got that pretty early in 2000 um also that year went to the National Hurricane conference again and this time I believe it was down in New Orleans and I was very excited to be there moving up in the world I took my Macintosh with me my power Mac G3 and showed off a lot of the storm surge project stuff that I was doing I also got to visit that year the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the first time the hurricane Highway went through Mississippi for the first time ever for me and I was very excited about that to see these places that I read about from past hurricanes Betsy 1965 Camille 1969 and visit these areas Gulfport Biloxi past Christiane Bay St Louis all these legendary places in the world of hurricane lore you know they they're real they really are but when you're a when you are a die-hard weather geek like me and you visit a place like the coast of Mississippi or Galveston Texas I'd I would get there in 2001. um it it really is like visiting the home of Elvis yeah where you go to Memphis or whatever and or you go to England and you visit Abbey Road and you see where the Beetles were or whatever I mean for Hurricane [Music] um aficionados hurricane Geeks like me visiting the Mississippi Coast was a big deal and I got to do that in 2000 and again I attended the conference the hurricane conference in New Orleans I actually had a booth I had enough funding from my mapping business my storm surge map project Etc my tracking maps and so forth that I was able to afford a booth in the exhibit hall and I was right in there uh with all the other vendors um and I got to meet Lou Fincher that year uh Lou Fincher is in the Friendswood area of Texas basically you could just say Houston Houston's a big area but you get down towards Galveston you have these other cities Friendswood and is where Lou Fincher Lou Fincher is he did he had a company maybe he and his wife still operate it now it's called hurricane Consulting Inc um and he did a lot of hurricane preparedness Consulting work back from his days and Safety Management Etc at uh Dupont so I got to meet Lou and Lou is one of these guys that like knows everybody you know he knew Max he knew all the guys at the Hurricane Center he knew people at the weather service and Lou was one of these people that he could drop names on you and it just blew your mind so I got to meet him that year and interact with other people that I'd heard about all my career you know different people from FEMA um different people from the Weather Service and because I had won the award from FEMA in 1999 my name was out there a little bit more I got to meet more people and it was just great so uh I um forged ahead after the conference you know hooked to head to the season what would the year 2000 hurricane season be like on the heels of five hurricanes in a row uh well roughly in a row for North Carolina Bertha Fran Bonnie Dennis Floyd uh anyway there's hurricanes elsewhere in the country of course they weren't all just in North Carolina but I had only intercepted or chased whatever you want to call it hurricanes in North Carolina up to this point and why not and they all came to me um so I was kind of ready to Branch out and I was still working with Eddie Smith in New Hanover County the project IMPACT program was still going though it was going to wind down there were seed money that FEMA gave and these projects get up and running and then you kind of let it stand on its own two legs and develop and maybe grow into its own thing to to build these disaster resistant communities but that's still very much a part of that very active with project and impact Mike Farrow my guest from the last episode from part three there of 1999 I worked with him the cumulus stations in Wilmington I mean I was very active my name finally was really getting out there to the extent that I even picked up some more projects I had interest now from the state of Georgia and the three coastal counties North Carolina has 21 Coastal counties 21 or 22 something like that Georgia has three and the three coastal counties down there they were all involved in Project impact now Savannah Brunswick I mean project impact was growing across the country uh they were it was expanding up into Freeport New York East Rockaway New York I had interest from them to do hurricane awareness projects storm surge related especially in the Northeast in Georgia and so these projects all began to take root you know everything takes time especially when you're dealing with the government even if it's a public-private partnership you don't just do something trust me if you're ever did anything with the government you know probably takes even longer now but these are where all of these projects begin to take root my name got out there more and more and it was a very exciting time for sure so we get into the season of 2000 and hurricane track.com uh you know doing its thing you know what we call blogging now we talked about this already um and I shed of course the name hurricane99.com was no longer relevant in the year 2000 and I just brought in I had already purchased hurricane track.com and that became the dominant you know staple site that's that's what it was called it's hurricane track.com and it really began to gain more traction news articles were done about it you know it was uh it was the portal the face of everything that I represented and it was a real exciting time for sure being one of the only people that was doing this at the time there was myself there was Jim Williams who ran hurricanecity.com and uh down in Delray Beach area Southeast Florida uh and you know the go PBI site storm2000.com or something there was a handful not like now where everybody has a Facebook page everybody is a weather expert and there's a lot of noise it's a different world today that is for sure but back then it was it was the Heyday it was really uh in the early part of my career still you know just uh riding that wave literally uh advancing the science of you know data collection I was very into that like I mentioned also continuing to work on different ways to get hurricane awareness out to more people in innovative ways and began doing animations computer simulation and CGI animations at the request of Max Mayfield at the National Hurricane Center at the time uh I would I was able to take pictures I've talked about this before I know I did I'll refresh your memory and mine too I was able to take photographs real photographs of an of an area uh I worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to do this and this is part of why I won the award that I did in 1999 part of the success of the storm surge Maps was because we could take actual photograph of buildings and put digital water on those photographs a CG computer generated imagery CGI bring the photograph into a three-dimensional world and add stuff to it clouds water that would reflect buildings from the photograph it was pretty freaking awesome now you can do all that with your iPhone and have augmented reality and turn yourself into a cat or a donkey or I mean with the Snapchat filters and everything else it makes what I did in 1999 and 2000 looked like you know um and so and I guess that's where they came up with the okay Boomer but I'm not a baby boomer that that would be my parents I think it sometimes is misguided and mislabeled how people use that term but I digress what we can do now on an iPhone is incredible isn't it but back in the day 99 2000 at the turn of the century as they say well that's a way to put it um it really was remarkable what I was able to do and to take that vision of what we saw in the movies right you know I learned a lot by watching people like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and James Cameron and others that did stuff in movies that were groundbreaking and that had a big influence on me watching computer-generated imagery evolve and then being able to use a prosumer um you know one level down from industrial Light and Magic grade stuff to do what I wanted to do in the world of hurricane awareness and I brought that to Max and he got very excited about it and we worked with the Corps of Engineers very closely and developed this really neat animation showing storm surge Rising simulating what a category three or four would do at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in New York I did this this was amazing it was on NBC News um you know it was on the National Hurricane Center website it's probably still out there somewhere and I did I took this photograph of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel that the Corps of Engineers provided to me we all work together to understand how high the water would potentially get in like a category 3 hurricane maybe a four I think it was a three though we wanted to be it's gonna be real hard to get a four up into New York obviously so you want to be realistic and not create too much hype so we I think we capped it at three estimated on the the photograph how high stuff was there's 10 feet there's 15 feet or whatever and I got my what are called markers right I was able to understand how to animate the water first the rise of water but then also to make it flow so that it looked like it was going into the tunnel we're right at the entrance of the tunnel where the photograph was taken and I am telling you it worked and I was even able to put like tires and sticks and debris in the water and make it flow and you had that perception that it was going from you know where you were as the point of view of the camera in the water towards the tunnel the the debris would get smaller as it disappeared into the tunnel I did all of that on a power Mac G3 in my office you know here in southeast North Carolina and it was remarkable to see that come to life and what that led to you know like I said they used it on uh like NBC Nightly News for a story I can't remember exactly when there was so much going on back then that I I didn't keep up with everything I mean it was like okay my work's good people are picking up on it this is what I would expect to happen um I didn't archive a lot of news stories I probably should have but I didn't I just kind of enjoyed it and was happy with the results and moved on you know and used that success to build other projects um so that was a big part of the year 2000 and again what an age the you know the.com era big time you know everything was a.com right uh and the the world of computers was exploding the internet um the online bubble was just growing exponentially every month computers became faster better you know we everybody had a cell phone now even if it was an old big one a brick almost or a bar phone or a flip phone or whatever they were becoming almost ubiquitous to where everybody literally had one you know and that would all set the stage for what was to come of course we know that now um so the hurricane season got here and it was yeah kind of lackluster overall um a fairly busy season but no hurricane landfalls that year believe it or not can you remember back now coming up on 21 years ago holy cow yes the year 2000 we had no hurricanes make landfall in the US that year came very close and there was a um there's always these pivotal moments right uh and the big one for 2000 I think if I had to put my finger on what was the most um you know the Benchmark moment of 2000 um you know had the awareness work that I talked about and these animations I was working on Etc but in the world of field missions um Eddie and I Eddie Smith uh the guy that I worked with at New Hanover County Department of Emergency Management he was an intern there remember he and I set out uh late in the evening for in mid-september for Hurricane Gordon it was a gulf hurricane heading into the Big Bend area maybe Cedar Key and you know I waffled on whether or not I should go and the Isuzu was ready um it had the anemometer on there the arm young the wind tracker and you know our site was doing great hurricane track.com remember we had these interactive um tracking Maps where you would Mouse over the different points on the map or regions on the map you could Mouse over you know we had a little icon of the Isuzu even that my buddy Jason my good friend Jason my grade school lifelong best friend he programmed all of that I mean we were way ahead of you know what we have now with Google Maps and the ability to Mouse over things and have pop-up information we were doing that in the year 2000 and it was remarkable but it all had to be done manually that was the only problem when I advisories came out we didn't have any scripts that we have now uh probably could have back then but I was just glad to have Maps so I'd have to update things manually it was a small text line file I would update and boom it was done but that included data coming from the truck or the SUV um the the Isuzu and so I have this little line of code that when I get a win reading or a pressure reading I could upload that line of code and if you moused over the Isuzu on the map you you'd see where we are at upload my GPS from like a Garmin handheld GPS device or something all of that would update on the map but I had to do it and if I couldn't do it then and remember we did not have wireless internet yet that was still a year away so I'd have to stop at a gas station and plug the laptop I finally bought a laptop by the way um I know I talked about that in 99 where I borrowed one from UNC Wilmington for Dennis and probably Floyd too but in 2000 I finally bought a laptop and yeah I'd have to plug it in you know the phone cord and connect at 28 8 or 56k or whatever and upload stuff to the site and so it was it was you know few and far between these updates but they were updates nevertheless and little mini blogs quick tidbits now hey we call that Twitter and we were doing that 21 years ago so Eddie and I head down there and we go out to Cedar Key and it's like a hurricane Chaser convention I was there with the Isuzu and I had another piece of equipment with me that little did I know would become a defining moment in the world of intercepting hurricanes not just for me but for pretty much everybody else and that was the fact that I had taken my hi8 camcorder uh it was just a Sony Handycam hi eight it might have been digital eight at this point I think it actually was what they call digital eight it's still high eight but it's a little bit better quality called digital 8 and it's still recording sequentially on tape in case you didn't know that you know like a chip in your cell phone or whatever that's all kind of random access memory it's non-sequential it's non-linear whereas tape audio cassettes reel to reel videotape is generally thought of as linear or sequential even if it's digital information you still have to go back and forth on the tape to get to it you can't just randomly access it instantly like you can with computer chips these days SD cards and so forth nevertheless whatever it was I had Sony Handycam uh I had purchased um I don't even know was eBay around I can't remember how I found this but I had located like a 2500 scuba diving housing minus the electronics inside of it that normally you would take a video camera or a um or a digital camera one of the early digital cameras of the of the day and you'd plug it in and you could control it from the handheld controllers of this let's put it this way it would be what filmmakers that wanted to film something underwater would use so we're talking it was literally like a twenty five hundred dollar piece of equipment but the electronics were not in it it was like the shell whatever they make that out of um I can't remember what it's made out of it's not carbon fiber but it was like this um it's like it's the scuba diving housing but it didn't have the electronics that's the point here so it only cost me I think that it was like eight hundred dollars which is still a lot but I had the funding so I bought it and you you put your camera on it it has a little thread screw on the bottom and it slides in this little track and you slide the video camera all the way to the front so that the lens is pressed up against the glass and it was very heavy and there's no controlling it you just turn it on put it in seal it up and you can film in the rain that was the idea I didn't want to go scuba diving with it I'm not out there filming manatees and you know fish I wanted to film outside of the Isuzu without getting the camera wet so that's what I did and boy I nailed it I really did it was incredible got this amazing point of view footage and Eddie was there with me it was remarkable the waves were crashing up against the the bulkhead of where this bridge was at Cedar Key Cedar Key right I mean 16 years later what would we do at Cedar Key remember her mean and we'll get there that'll be in a much farther down the road episode or chapter but that's where it started with Cedar Key I had this housing filming the the effects from Gordon which weakened down to a tropical storm right before landfall at 70 miles per hour um I was Keeping Up With The Wind readings the pressure reading is noting those uh literally we had no way no data no data out there we didn't you know duck into somebody's condo or restaurant hey can I use your phone line and plug in my computer uh so what I did I would literally call my wife back home in North Carolina and ask her can you update these lines of code for me I taught her how to do it and she did it and voila the the website would update it was like maybe twice an hour but in the year 2000 that was pretty remarkable to get these updates right you know and just a quick comment you know can you just put this on the site please and she would and it was awesome it really was and um so there I was filming in the elements you know waves are crashing over me I was wearing like a yellow rain jacket kind of thing and I had the letters h-i-r-t uh embroidered on the back of it like you know like an FBI jacket or something or where it says police you know um this said hurt for Hurricane intercept research team and I wore that with some rain pants and filmed it you know right at Point Blank I would put the camera uh the housing right on the railing and film the waves and there was somebody several somebody's actually but one of the somebody's that we all know today at least we should if we follow this stuff closely and it was Jim Ed's Jim edds Jim EDS uh he was there and also Jim Leonard also Mike Tice and as and others that have come to know over the years like I said it was this big mentioned we all knew that Cedar Key was going to take the brunt um so everybody just kind of showed up and uh totally by random and by accident you know wasn't planned but we were all there and we stayed out there Eddie and myself until probably 8 30 9 o'clock that night Gordon made landfall nearby we got some good wind readings some pressure readings uh emailed those when we could to the National Hurricane Center collected great video that is for darn sure uh from both the camera housing as well as filming from inside the Isuzu Etc a lot of before establishment shots you know good b-roll kind of stuff and it was great you know we were exhausted but it was a really good intercept considering that the year 2000 was generally lackluster you know I think there was 15 name storms that year 15 or 16. so it was a busy season but the Hurricanes just managed to avoid the United States that was the big deal and um you know we needed it after the five that we had in the late 90s uh and that was pretty much it so you know this is will end up being a fairly short chapter but some of the years are like that you know you get these breakthrough moments that will lead to other things and and you know again to kind of rehash that the two that really stand out from the year 2000 would be the computer animation that I was working on these continuation of these projects with these project impact communities that were growing more and more numerous around the country uh as I mentioned Georgia and these two um Villages as they're called The Village of East Rockaway in the village of Freeport in New York that that would all come in uh into play a year later but there was something else that happened in 2000 that again set the stage and was getting ready to open a very big door for me part of the project IMPACT program in New Hanover County and in Wilmington was that we'd have this massive hurricane awareness expo at the trash Coliseum at UNC Wilmington where they play men's basketball you can fit 6 000 people in there and 1999 n 2000 we had these just huge events all of the media worked together ABC NBC Fox all the stations whether it was cumulus or another group of stations Beasley broadcasting or whomever I think that was one of them you know all the stations everybody would get together we all worked together Lowe's Home Depot you know car drugs CVS or whoever Walgreens well we didn't have Walgreens yet but you get what I mean we were all we put all if it was politics you would say we put our partisan lines aside the party lines you know merged and we did we all worked together and we would have thousands and thousands of people that would come to this Expo and learn about hurricanes they would hear from the Weather Service they would hear from you know vendors people from Lowe's Home Depot about generators they would the private companies about window protection uh you know me I had a booth and I would give out maps and talk about what I did in hurricanes and little did I know that uh well let me back up a minute Lowe's and Home Depot were kind of some of the Marquee sponsors Lowe's Home Improvement and so Lowe's corporate sent a representative uh to the 2000 Expo and um he picked up some of the stuff from around the the different vendors the booths Etc and he mingled with me and we're going to talk about this guy a little bit in the next episode next week um but uh that was a you know just if you know my history you know what's coming and that was the seed for it that hurricane Expo in the year 2000 another real big one and the fact that Lowe's had sent one of their community relations people that uh down there um from community relations corporate was big and I'll tease that as that goes into the year 2001. um so that was a big stepping stone that huge hurricane Expo a lot of fun uh the data that was collected you know my interactions with the Hurricane Center to send that information in I actually worked on like my own little documentary type thing uh put one together about hurricane Gordon um that year uh I used some music from you know copyrighted sources back then I wasn't able to digitally record music like I can now where I score my own stuff I think I used some stuff from Hans Zimmer um that year and why not you know he's one of the best and his music goes real well with some hurricane footage as you can imagine and yeah it was great to work with Eddie continuously uh and expand that relationship with him and not only intercepting hurricanes but what do we do with that data you know how do we use it to help the community and what do we learn from it showing examples of the effects you know not just out there recording for the heck of recording and we weren't just Thrill Seekers and that really started to show it really did and I translated that well through the website writing up reports about what we did out there the data that was collected and the impacts and so forth and so the year wrapped up the year 2000 wrapped up again on a very positive note you know it was myself um in terms of my personal life myself my wife and uh two kids and but that would change again in 2001 of course uh you know I've got seven kids now right so there's the there's the end I gave away the end if you didn't know that and you pick yourself up off the floor yes I do I have seven kids so if you're keeping track in the year 2000 I was up to two so we have five more to go throughout the course of finishing this podcast series over the next couple of years um that'll be something won't it so that's it I mean you know the year 2000 um best summed up as keeping the momentum going all these exciting projects just gained more traction and I was very proud very honored to be able to do this and do it for a living you know I was able to support my family and do this full-time you know it's not eight to five I go and punch a time card and you know at eight and clock out at five I worked at home and so I did what I could I was able to still be a family man never had to put my kids in daycare so forth and so on they were getting ready Nathan was getting ready to start school you know he was old enough now he was born in 97 uh that wouldn't be too long that he'd be starting school right so things are progressing you know my career is doing great personal life growing the family able to do this full-time and you know what a road ahead the old hurricane Highway metaphor uh definitely in full force here that it finally LED out of North Carolina you know down to Cedar Key Florida I-95 down to you know probably 75 to Gainesville and then uh from there out 24. uh Highway 24 it is out to uh Cedar Key so the hurricane Highway you know leaving the state of North Carolina for the first time in the year 2000 all of that you know so there you go um in the next chapter as we get into the year 2001. obviously a very very big and important year for our country you know why September 11th and all of that had a big impact on what I was doing as well and then you know as I tease ahead for what we'll go over in uh next week probably going to break 2001 up into two separate um Parts part one and part two uh so next Wednesday night I'll drop part one and we'll go over some things that were growing in the year 2001 more projects coming online storm surge mapping Etc that's also the year that I met one of our very important uh colleagues Jessie baths yeah he came in uh into the scene in 2001 officially um even though I had met him previously probably at one of those Expos I think he said but I'm getting ahead of myself that's next week so more exciting things to come up as we go into the First full year after the new decade in the New Millennium Etc the new century the year 2000 behind us we will get into the year 2001. in next week's episode or chapter as it were of stories from the hurricane Highway as always I cannot tell you I mean I never will be able to emote through this podcast I mean if you ever met me in person I could probably show the emotion on my face of how much it means to me that you're there listening to this you support what I'm doing this important project uh the crowdfunding aspect of it is so important and I'm so glad and honored to have you on the other side to listen to this um tonight when I post this on patreon it will be embedded in patreon and you can use the RSS feed to hopefully listen to it or you can just press play right there in patreon but I'm also going to put the link to where this is on our webpage on the hurricane track Insider server so you'll have a listing of everything they are MP3 files and so if you missed something from the past maybe you're a new Patron is as you listen to this months from now or whatever yes there will be a link in tonight's um posting on patreon where all of the episodes live and we'll live hopefully for years to come as always I so much appreciate you tuning in it's great like I said to have you there thank you so much I am Mark suddath you have been listening to another chapter of stories from the hurricane highway I'll be back again next week as we take a look back at the year 2001 thanks have a great rest of your evening or whenever it is that you're listening to this this evening for me as I cut this I'll talk to you again with another story next week