Hurricane!
Hurricane Ian is on its way to hurt Florida. In 1998 I flew through the eye of Hurricane Bonnie and then raced to the Carolina coast to meet her on land. It was a wet way to have some journalism fun.
Day 1 — Hurricane Bonnie belies her menace
August 26, 1998
On land, emergency officials were ordering people to run for their lives and evacuate North Carolina's coastline.
But 300 miles off the coast of Florida, deep in the heart of a spinning mass of energy bigger than the state of Kansas, Hurricane Bonnie seemed peaceful and tame, not menacing.
At 2 p.m. yesterday, she looked just like any other collection of thunderstorms.
At 10,000 feet, as our specially outfitted C-130 Hercules transport lumbered through Bonnie's eye gathering computer screenfuls of weather data, there was no lightning, no thunder and little rain.
A few times turbulence made the freighter-like C-130 dip and sway and create nerve-racking seconds of weightlessness.
But staring out the thundering plane's windows at the gray-white swirl of ill-defined clouds and the wind-whipped whitecaps in the ocean below, you'd never know you were in the middle of a Category 3 hurricane whose winds were being clocked at more than 115 mph.
Bonnie still seemed to be trying to make up her mind whose beachfront properties she wanted to obliterate.
In the last four hours, our C-130 had pierced her eye three times, constantly taking her temperature and pulse, clocking her wind speeds and trying to plot her direction. Here’s what it looked like when Hurricane Hunters flew through the eye of Hurricane Epsilon in 2020.
She was growing slightly stronger, weather officer Eric Dutton said from his seat in the crowded cockpit.
Her eyewall, though ragged and invisible to the satellite cameras that provide Weather Channel watchers with their overhead shots, was becoming more defined again. Her winds were picking up nicely in her southwest and northwest quadrants.
And finally, she had stopped dithering about where she was headed.
Dutton, who has penetrated more than 120 hurricanes in his career, said Bonnie had picked up speed. She had started tracking northwest at a perky 15 mph, a significant acceleration since Monday, when she seemed almost stalled and out of gas.
All of that information and much more — including the savvy, out-the window observations of Bonnie's idiosyncrasies that only pilot Jimmy Stewart and crew can provide — is constantly being sent to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
The information is gathered by the C-130 and data from satellites and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to try to accurately predict where Bonnie will be 24 or 36 hours hence.
But one thing Dutton and his crewmates have learned in years of professional hurricane watching: they are always fickle and unpredictable, whether they're named after Bonnie or Fred. They're liable to do anything and go anywhere.
The Hurricane Hunters, as they call themselves, are really members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.
Since World War II, the Air Force reserve unit has had a virtual monopoly on hurricane monitoring. During hurricane season from June 1 to Nov, 30, its 10 planes provide the National Hurricane Center with virtually instantaneous, 24-hour, on-the-scene weather data.
The more accurate the data, the more accurate the forecast. The more accurate the forecast, the more precise the evacuation orders can be. And with evacuations costing about $1 million per mile of coastline evacuated, precision pays off.
Yesterday's C-130 flight left Biloxi at about 5:20 a.m. and returned at about 4:30 p.m., and it was a noisy, uncomfortable ride all the way.
The cavernous four-engine plane, built to last forever in 1965, is like a flying gas-station garage.
Full of pipes, hoses, straps, conduits, wires and the roar of its four stubby propellers, it shakes, rattles, hisses, vibrates and makes human conversation impossible without radio headsets.
Five crewmen — pilot, co-pilot, navigator, flight engineer and weatherman — can fit in the cockpit. Nearly half the "passenger” section is consumed by a 2,000-gallon gas tank, which explains why the Hurricane Hunters have had a smoke-free workplace for decades.
Near the plane's tail, a sixth crewman periodically releases dropsondes, which are 16-inch cardboard tubes with parachutes and radio transmitters that contain weather-sensing instruments.
Steven Debree sent five dropsondes into Bonnie yesterday, four into the eye and one into the eyewall. His last one was launched a little after noon, as the C-130 turned to the northwest and began its last 100-mile pass through Bonnie's half-closed eye and headed for home.
In the Carolinas below, more than a half-million tourists and residents were getting out of her way. But out in the Atlantic, Bonnie — despite what all the instruments and the weathermen were saying about her — was still acting more like a lady than a natural disaster.
Day 2 — Three ways to handle storm: bail out, dig in or party hearty
August 27, 1998
CAPE CARTERET, N.C. — What do you do when a megastorm bigger than Texas nas its eye on your hometown?
Well, if you live on the North Carolina coast, where every other year or three, it seems, a hurricane like Bonnie or Fran comes crashing ashore, the answers are easy.
If you are a good citizen, you get out the duct tape. Or the plywood. You turn off the electricity and the gas. And after you say a quick prayer that your house will be there when you return, you head for the interior or the local shelter.
If you are the stubborn sort, you ignore all that good radioed advice. You call the children and dogs into the house, get the flashlights and chainsaw ready, and wait until it blows over.
If you are completely un-intimidated by Mother Nature's power, or are just an especially cocky human life form, which many southern North Carolinians seem to be, you throw a hurricane party at a local motel.
Or sit nonchalantly on your leeward side porch and wait for the rain, wind and convoys of yellow electric-company repair trucks to arrive.
Residents of a lone slice of barely above sea level sand, like Emerald Isle, N.C., usually don't have the choice of staying put.
When hurricanes like Bonnie come calling, the island — which has the annoying habit of disappearing under the high tides produced by storm surges — is usually quickly evacuated and its bridges sealed off by state police.
That means residents and tourists must grab their air mattresses and sleeping bags and children — no pets, please — and head over to the mainland and White Oak Elementary School, the Cape Carteret community's trusty hurricane shelter.
At noon yesterday, Hurricane Bonnie was still stuck in park in the Atlantic, 150 miles south of Emerald Isle.
But at White Oak Elementary, temporary population 207, most of the locals and vacationing Yankees like the Harringtons, of Fairmont, W.Va., were lining up in the cafeteria for free Red Cross-brand vegetable soup, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and cookies.
On a TV with twisted tinfoil serving as rabbit ears, a local Channel 12 weatherman stood before a map that showed Bonnie offshore in all her counter-clockwise, swirling, green-and-yellow beauty.
Outside, rain belonging to an early wave of Bonnie's thunderstorms was beating on the windows and doors and dripping into several buckets from a leak in the hallway roof.
The Harringtons — father Dan, mother Gail, daughters Jennifer, 15, and Kristen, 12, and son Stephen, 8 — had been enjoying their customary summer vacation in a rented house when Emerald Isle was slapped with a mandatory evacuation order on Tuesday.
Now, in a cruel twist of fate, they were trapped in a school building, sleeping on the hall floor, and trying desperately to have fun.
Outside, on Route 24, few motorists braved the blustery rain storm. What little traffic there was consisted mainly of police cars and sport utility vehicles, manned by invading news reporters and photographers.
All the stores were closed and plywooded as a lone pedestrian, a local who gave the name Vince Garcia, marched up and down the side of the road.
Whether he was mad or tipsy or a little of both, Garcia spurned several ride offers as he busied his drenched and happy-go-lucky self by removing scraps of plywood from the road, or splashing childishly through the ankle-deep puddles.
An hour or two later, as Bonnie and her 115-mph winds and heavy rains moved ever so slightly closer, Warren James and Tom Crigger, of Greenville, N.C., proved that Garcia was not the only North Carolinian who goes a little nuts in a hurricane.
As 70-mph winds began whipping Bogue Islet into an angry froth, and pushed its waters closer and closer to the back walls of the homes and businesses on Route 24, James and Crigger stopped to use a restroom at a small park that provides the public with boat access to the water.
The restroom was locked up tightly, like everything else in town, so Crigger answered nature's call in his own way, discreetly adding a pint or two of highly filtered local beer to the storm surge.
Later, he and James walked to the wave-pounded wooden deck at the water's edge and shoved their faces square to the splashing wet wind.
As James explained above the howl, if you face the wind and raise your right arm from your side and point to the right, you'll point directly at the eye of the hurricane.
Whether it was true or dumb luck, he was correct: His right hand was pointing straight at where Bonnie's eye was fixed.
Unfortunately, by late last night, Bonnie — who continues to confound those who've tried to predict her path — had barely moved from the spot James pointed to.
Her eye was still just south of Wilmington, N.C., near Cape Fear, half on land, half on water. And not even the experts on the Weather Channel knew for sure where she would go next or why she was so reluctant to leave the sea.
Day 3 — Bonnie runs out of gas
MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. — Though their home was still rocking and rolling violently, Denny Breese and his wife, Sun, had already withstood the worst Hurricane Bonnie would dish out.
Early yesterday morning, not long after a recalcitrant Bonnie decided to take her spinning trip up the coast of eastern North Carolina, the Breeses' home had been blasted with 100-mph winds and monsoon-like rains.
But by 11:30 a.m., conditions were much improved. Bonnie was still in a foul and dangerous mood and still right outside, beating hard against the windows.
But the Breeses were doing what they always do when hurricanes come knocking — staying put in their home, which in their case is a 40-foot fishing boat named the Tern.
Despite all of Bonnie's considerable powers, the Tern, the Breeses, their two Pekingese dogs and their cat Jaws remained securely tethered to the dock of Russell's Marina on Morehead City's waterfront.
The power was out in this sea-coast town and everywhere else in eastern North Carolina, so the Breeses had to fire up their generator. As Sun prepared her husband's lunch, she kept an eye on the Weather Channel's latest report.
Outside, the light rain was being turned into millions of invisible face-stinging bullets by. the steady 70 mph gale that chewed up the surface of the small harbor on Beauport Inlet and battered the half-dozen unoccupied boats anchored out in its middle.
Breese, 62, is a former Navy nuclear submariner. It's the only explanation he gives for being on a boat in the middle of a hurricane.
He had to yell to be heard over the howling wind as he stood rocksteady on the stern of his wildly bucking home. Nowadays, he's a salvage operator, who's spent the last 10 years looking for a sunken Spanish galleon.
Breese is an old hand at weathering hurricanes. Fran, which hit Morehead City in September 1996, was the worst of the four he's ridden out on the Tern.
As for Morehead City, its gentrified waterfront was taking a noontime whipping.
Street signs were flapping and the tall street lamps along the waters edge were wobbling furiously in synch, but only Bonnie had done more damage in nearby Beaufort, another coastal town even more exposed to the sea.
At the tip of Divers Island, a one-story brick dormitory had had its roof completely ripped off. Across the short bridge over Beaufort Inlet, Emerald Isle's luxurious beach houses and resorts also rode out Bonnie's sustained winds pretty well.
The long, thin barrier island, accessible by two bridges, was under curfew and patrolled by dozens of vigilant police cars. At 9:30 a.m., Bonnie's winds dropped to 85 mph, earning her a downgrade to Category I status.
The high, arching concrete span, which disappeared into the gray ceilingless sky, was raked by powerful winds and heavy rain. The island was depopulated but largely unscathed.
On its backside, where the Atlantic Ocean was smashing against its wide sandy beaches, a few trailers in the Beachfront RV Park had lost parts of their roofs. There also was some minor flooding.
In a more opulent neighborhood nearby, where the asphalt shingle-littered streets were lined with handsome two- and three-story beach houses and apartments, Reece McGowen, 13, was doing an impersonation of a drowned rat.
A permanent resident, he and his family had ignored calls for evacuation. Reece, dressed in sandals, bathing suit and yellow rain slicker, had been down on the beach checking to see how much of it had eroded over night. A lot of it had disappeared, he said, and so did some residents' steps.
Emerald Isle's eastern end, where all the malls and commerce are located, sustained more obvious damage, but didn't appear severe enough to qualify for federal disaster relief.
Power lines and tree limbs were down. In Atlantic Beach, a Coca-Cola vending machine had ended up on its side in a mini-mall parking lot. A set of traffic lights had fallen into an intersection.
Bonnie's hurricane winds were impressive, especially the way they blew and blew for hours with undiminished power. But after driving through several of the 10 incredibly flat counties in southeast North Carolina that she hit hardest, it's clear that her winds are not nearly as destructive as the ocean of water they carry.
But even as Hurricane Bonnie was slipping out into the Atlantic, reduced to a tropical storm, the soggy, wind-whipped folks of southeastern North Carolina kept a wary eye on an up-and-coming troublemaker with an innocent name: Danielle.
Travails With Bonnie
Five weeks later, in a pathetic attempt to earn a Pulitzer for my suffering, I wrote this account of my Bonnie-chasing adventure in the Post-Gazette’s Sunday edition.
Travels With Bonnie
Oct. 11, 1998
The most dangerous part of my whirlwind trip through the South last August was not passing through the eye of Hurricane Bonnie four times.
It was not eating gas-station food for four days. Or getting three hours of sleep in 60 hours.
It wasn't even what my mother would say -- it was running around in my bare feet though a 70-mph gale on a rain-whipped, half-flooded marina.
The most life-threatening part of my hurricane-chasing trip, by far, was sleeping in a $35 motel room at the Sunset Lodge in Jacksonville, N.C., which, judging from the footprints on the bathroom walls and the battered condition of the door to Room 236, has been party headquarters for the Marines since D-Day.
Of course, I have no one to blame but myself for my harrowing close encounter with a scary motel room in North Carolina.
I had always thought it would make a good newspaper story to fly through the eye of a hurricane like Bonnie somewhere over the South Atlantic in one of those weather planes, then rush to wherever the storm hit land and report on what it is like to be at ground zero.
I just never thought my bosses would actually shell out real money to let me do something so silly and untried. But they did.
Monday, 3 p.m. Bonnie-bound
As massive, slow-moving Bonnie is still growing into a Category 3 hurricane and eyeing up North Carolina's southern sea-coast, I'm winging to New Orleans to meet my accomplice, Block News Alliance photographer Allan Detrich.
Hours before, Detrich made arrangements for us to fly to Bonnie's eye Tuesday morning with the Air Force's Hurricane Hunters, a special reserve unit based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.
Three hours after Detrich called, I am in the air. With my bosses' instructions still ringing in my ears -- “Don't spend too much money” and, “Oh yeah, try not to kill yourself” -- TWA flies me to New Orleans for about $525, less a 25 percent discount for flying through St. Louis.
As part of some special deal apparently only available to hurricane chasers, I get bumped up to first class, which is why I am eating my half-ounce of peanuts with real silverware and a cloth napkin.
Actually, I'm served a dainty chicken sandwich on a nice roll. If I had known it was going to be my last decent meal for the next 36 hours, I would have eaten the pickle.
Monday, 9:30 p.m. Eyeing up Bonnie
I meet Allan and 50-pounds of his photo gear and we rent a Ford Taurus from Hertz and head east. By midnight we are basking in the neon glow of Biloxi's row of gambling casinos, which look fancy in a tasteless, Las Vegas kind of way, but are not too busy.
We check in at the air base and by 3 a.m. we are aboard our C-130, which is designed for carrying tanks and paratroopers and does not include an inflight movie. As the four engines roar to life, we insert our ear plugs and settle in for the 12-hour, 3,600-mile haul to Bonnie's eye and back.
By the time the sun is over the horizon we are crawling over Florida at about 300 mph. What's the worst airline you've ever experienced? Aeroflot? People Express? One of those roller-coaster commuter prop jobbies?
Whatever it was, half a day on a C-130 with fold-down aluminum-and-plastic seats designed for airborne troops is much worse, especially if you're trying to sleep.
We fly and fly and fly, gathering data for the National Hurricane Center in Miami and piercing and re-piercing Bonnie's eye four times at 10,000 feet.
It isn't particularly bumpy. It isn't particularly exciting. And it isn't particularly worthwhile, since it's too noisy to talk to anyone without a radio headset and there are few windows and little to see except clouds and flashes of really stormy seas.
Tuesday, 4:30 p.m. Sleepless in Atlanta
Back on the ground in Biloxi, we head to the local paper, the Sun Herald, where I write my story and Detrich develops his film. After everything is beamed to the Post-Gazette via the Internet, we jump in the car, grab a dinner-to-go at a Cracker Barrel and ride the interstates at 75 mph to Atlanta, 350 miles away.
On the way we use our cell phone to call Delta and reserve a pair of one-way tickets on a 6:20 a.m. flight the next morning to Raleigh-Durham, a surprising last-minute bargain at $133 each. At about 2:30 am., we check-in at a Days Inn near the Atlanta airport.
After two hours sleep, we get up, dump our Taurus at Hertz and catch a plane to sunny Raleigh. There we rent a four-wheel-drive Jimmy and drive 100-plus miles east to drizzly Jacksonville, N.C., where plywood and tape are the window treatments du jour and where virtually every business is closed in anticipation of Bonnie's predicted arrival later that day.
Wednesday, noon, Motel Hell
Of course, because of hurricane madness, all of the motel rooms at the nicer chains are already taken. Only the Sunset Lodge, Official Party Place of the U.S. Marine Corps, has vacancies. We each get a room, toss our bags in them and hit the road.
As the rain and wind start arriving in serious amounts, we munch on our gas-station cuisine and cruise around doing journalistically useful things -- visiting a storm shelter in a school, photographing a tow truck rescuing a pickup truck before it is swept out to sea, interviewing drunks cavorting in the surging surf at bay side.
By 7:30, as Bonnie's spinning eye is still stuck just off the coast 60 miles south, I have written my second hurricane article for the PG on a borrowed laptop computer whose Internet-access account is guarded by a password I don't know. I dictate my story to an editor from my motel room, where the power flickers off and on like I am in Congo.
At 8, Detrich and I miraculously find the only source of eat-in or take-out food still operating in southeastern North Carolina -- a Chinese restaurant, where an older man with a mop was vainly fighting a flood of rainwater leaking under the front door.
We arrive back in our motel rooms with our sesame chicken dinners just in time for the power to go off. We eat in the dark and look forward to our first real sleep in 60 hours.
But without power, there is no air-conditioner. Without an air-conditioner, there is no way air can get in my tiny room. At 3 am, I'm dying. As Bonnie is finally starting her move inland, I open my door wide and leave it open.
What does it matter? Wind-blown rain water is already seeping in under the door and under the air-conditioner anyway. Plus, with so many Marines prowling around, I figure no one will dare to murder me in my sleep.
Thursday, 7:30 a.m. A day with Bonnie
We wake up Thursday morning in the middle of Bonnie's eye. All Jacksonville and the rest of southeastern North Carolina is still powerless. We check out of the Sunset Lodge and by 9 we are working our way toward Morehead City, 25 miles up the coast.
Halfway there, we exit Bonnie's sleepy eye and enter her powerful eye-wall, where winds are a relentless 70 mph-plus and rain is thick.
For the next several hours, the storm's intensity never diminishes. We ignore the police barricades meant to prevent access to the bridge to Emerald Isle, a hurricane-exposed barrier island that had been mandatorily evacuated two days before, though many residents opted to hole up in their homes.
Damage is light -- a lot of shallow flooding, a few downed trees and dangling wires, a few thousand dislodged shingles.
I explore the Atlantic Ocean beach in my hurricane-chasing gear -- bathing suit, T-shirt and bare feet. I interview a 13-year-old native boy in a rain slicker who had been checking beach erosion. The two times police cars pull us over, Detrich and I earnestly explain that we were such dumb reporters we did not know we were where we shouldn't be.
Thursday, 1 1 :30 a.m. We cover the waterfront
When we arrive at Morehead City's gentrified waterfront, it is being lashed by unrelenting 70-mph winds. For the next several hours, Detrich and I drive around Morehead City and nearby Beauport, both of which had been whipped by Bonnie's 110-mph winds the night before.
Again, damage is surprisingly minimal -- dropped power lines, a missing dormitory roof, a few small pleasure boats sunk.
Finally, we head inland, where every ditch and depression in the flatscape is filled with water.
In the quaint historic town of Washington the sun is out and Bonnie is already a wet memory. But high tides, 10 inches of rain and flooding from the Pamlico River have closed a major road and drowned many intersections under two feet of muddy water.
It wasn't until we make Greenville, N.C, that we eat any food more substantial than fig bars -- a pizza at 4 p.m. We perform our journalistic duties for the Friday paper, then at about 8:30 p.m. head for the Raleigh-Durham airport 90 miles away, making plane reservations on the way.
Friday, 8 a.m. The bill for Bonnie
After a restful night in a Hampton Inn, I'm flying back to Pittsburgh on US Airways for $346. In less than four crazy days of chasing Bonnie, I flew about 6,000 miles, drove 1,000 miles and averaged 4.5 hours of sleep per night.
The bill for Bonnie's visit to North Carolina and Virginia was $2 billion, cheap by hurricane standards.
Detrich paid for our rental cars and had his own costs, but I only spent about $900 on airfare, $96 on food and $165 on three motel rooms.
Though Big Bad Bonnie turned out to be a bust when she came ashore, I had had an unforgettable albeit slightly insane and grueling trip.
I had experienced a hurricane in a way few if any other journalists have and no normal traveler ever could. I filed three newspaper articles, plus Allan’s photos. And I didn't so much as cut my bare foot on a piece of glass.
Next hurricane season, maybe I'll lead a tour.