Twenty years ago this week, as part of the unusually busy southeastern North Carolina hurricane season, Hurricane Fran roared into the Wilmington area as a Category 3 hurricane, then mowed down trees and power lines all the way through Raleigh, barely losing hurricane status there. It continued with flooding rain into Virginia and the Northeast. Twenty-six were killed and $3,200,000,000 damage was done. It replaced Hurricane Hazel (1954) in the vernacular of parts of the state and appears in the top 10 most severe landfalling U.S. Atlantic hurricanes.

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I was there, and this week I'm launching a blog series about the storm. In 1996, I was living in Raleigh, North Carolina, and attempted to "storm chase" towards her landfall but fell short of the coast due to massive power outages and downed trees. As I drove back to town, Fran followed, trouncing the city with record wind damage and flooding rain. I'll tell that story in another "Franniversary" blog later this week. Following are wind and rainfall maps that I had AccuWeather create for the storm, based on NWS maps.

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Frying Pan Shoals coastal station (which is now a bed & breakfast) measured a wind gust to 124 mph near the storm's landfall, but winds persisted inland, with Greenville, North Carolina, clocking 100 mph and nearly 80 in Raleigh. Fran's rainfall was also impressive -- while the Raleigh area got nearly 10 inches of rain, the storm dropped as much as 16 inches in the mountains of Virginia, isolating towns and causing the Shenandoah River to crest 13 feet above flood stage at Fort Luray, a record that remains to this day.

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Many others have taken a lot of time to prepare 20th anniversary websites about Hurricane Fran. Here is a list of a few of them:

- AccuWeather.com - Raleigh News & Observer Newspaper (great county-by-county rundown) - WRAL-TV - WCNC TV - WNCN TV - NWS Wilmington - NC State - WikiPedia

This 3-D satellite image has always been a favorite of mine. It shows Hurricane Fran perched off the Florida coast, ready to attack North Carolina. It was created with state-of-the-art software by NASA.

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In my archives, I found and digitized four VHS tapes with Hurricane Fran specials that have never before been seen online. The first two were retrospectives on the storm from Raleigh TV stations WRAL-TV (Channel 5) and Channel 11, and were sold locally after the storm. The third was a retrospective on the active 1996 Hurricane Season by WWAY-3 in Wilmington (I honestly can't remember how I obtained this but it appeared to be a VHS tape cut by the station).

The fourth tape might be the most interesting. It's mostly raw aerial damage, produced by the North Carolina Highway Patrol. This was broadcast on public television the day after Fran trashed the coast. Before drones and Social Media (or really, reliable Internet service) the only way to find out whether or not your house was damaged was to watch this film, produced via helicopter by the N.C. Highway Patrol, the day after Fran when almost no one besides the National Guard was allowed onto these beaches.

For a transcript of the intro, and time codes for each sweep of the beach, read this blog.