My Story: 25-Year Anniversary of Hurricane Hugo

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I awoke to a loud tempest of wind and rain in North Carolina, with broken television updates from Meteorologist Eric Thomas at WBTV Charlotte (in between static and power flickers). Hurricane Hugo had arrived at my home in the North Carolina foothills.

One of the most amazing things about this storm was how far inland the extreme winds plowed. No one expected winds over 100 mph in central South Carolina, or for the storm to just be losing its eye, with winds over 80 mph, as it passed to my west, 240 miles inland!

THE MAKING OF A HUGO MAP: For the 25th-anniversary milestone, I wanted to create a wind map from the storm. I found an old, hard-to-read National Weather Service map (scanned in from paper) highlighting wind gusts during the storm, redrew it roughly in Photoshop then had our graphic artist Al Blasko massage it into the work of art that you see above. (You've seen these types of maps before [for example Hurricane Sandy] but the technology to create them didn't exist in 1989, so I'm proud to add this map to the annals of Internet hurricane lore today).

At the link below from my blog in 2009, I talked about the extreme damage in the Virgin Islands and at the U.S. coast (Hugo made landfall at Isle of Palms, South Carolina, just northeast of Charleston).

WBTV, the station I was watching that fateful morning, has an excellent 25-Year Hurricane Hugo Retrospective. There are also dozens of videos on YouTube about Hurricane Hugo, including this excellent retrospective on the storm by the NWS at Charleston, South Carolina. At the time, it was ranked as the costliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland, with damages totaling $7 billion!

I was also interviewed for today's AccuWeather.com article: "25th Anniversary: Hurricane Hugo Left Path of Destruction in US, Caribbean." My late father Frank Ferrell's photo of our damaged beach house in North Carolina was used in the story and on the front page of AccuWeather.com this morning.

Below is a copy of the part of the story quoting me:

"Hurricane Hugo solidified my career path in meteorology," AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Jesse Ferrell said, "Like many meteorologists, I had been interested in weather since I could talk. My house being struck by lightning in 1987, and Hurricane Hugo in 1989, were two major events that deeply stirred my weather curiosity."

Ferrell, who was 15 years old at the time, lived in Boomer, North Carolina, in the North Carolina Foothills.

"At the time, it was the most dangerous weather-related situation I had ever been in," he said, "I thought it was super fun until we were cowering in the basement, the ground shaking as trees fell, wondering if we might emerge back upstairs to see our house destroyed."

I also found a number of old maps from the NWS and AccuWeather; you can peruse them by clicking on this link:

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