Hurricane Floyd Duck, North Carolina, September 1999

Here's a collection of photos taken during and after hurricane Floyd at Duck, North Carolina. This storm was categorized a 500-year event in weather history of North Carolina; most of the damage was caused by flooding which did not bring much harm Barrier Islands. The eye of the hurricane passed West of the Sound, not too far though. By that time, wind anemometer at Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility at Duck recorded sustained winds about 35-40 m/s (78-90 mph, or 70-80 kts) and maximum gust of 47 m/s (104 mph, or 94 kts), long way down from the hurricane's Category 4 rating just a few hours before. The mandatory evacuation was in order for Barrier Islands, but by the time the hurricane was close it looked like there will be more danger on the roads, jammed with cars in pouring rain, than in the drier and calmer conditions on the islands. We didn't brave sitting out the storm in our wooden rental house (we saw no damage whatsoever to any residential buildings, a credit for local building code), but retired into the safety of concrete walls of the FRF building. Power was out for several hours, and the only road going up the island was under three - four feet of water. Besides shelter, FRF offered us hot coffee and a network link to the outside world, so we could receive all our junk email together with a few useful messages and reminders of late and lost paperwork :-) Our free email account providers - Netscape and Hotmail - competed fiercely for being the slowest; but, that was our only day when we had nowhere to rush - gotta be something good about the hurricane.

Click on the pictures to view the full-resolution images (take into account ~300kB image file size). Two pictures in the second column were taken by Mike Ritter.
 

Surf zone near FRF pier. The surf  conditions were quite remarkable - swells coming from SE, very strong alongshore current - about 2 kts or more, and winds changing rapidly from SE to W.  Picture was taken around noon.		This was a few hours later - winds changed to westerly, and most of the storm surge happened in the sound, causing flooding of the main and only throughfare of the island.
View of FRF pier near the peak of the storm. Clicking on the picture will invoke the movie (crappy in quality, but large in size animated GIF file)	Gotta love those psychodelic colors! What a cheap frame grabber can do to a fairly decent recording! (Same warning about the movie clip)	Yet one more video clip of the surf zone, taken from the FRF pier near the peak of the storm.
	Humans aren't the only species confused by the storm - the birds and animals had their hard times, too. These swans found a quiet haven - well, there were some debris flying across that puddle.		There was a loose cat darting across the road and between houses - too scared to accept any food.
	The storm disappeared as fast as it came if not faster - by the nighttime we had almost clear skies, and some scenic clouds to picture.

There will be more pictures and possibly video clips from this event, as films get developed, pictures scanned, and video fed into computers - stay tuned!
 
 

Home

Three Rivers Junction - What's in the name?

San Diego Getaways

4x4 in Russia

Full - Size Jeep Page

Email Me