By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer
Last Sunday night, there were three big systems chugging their way across the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricane Igor, which at one time was an intense Category 4 was closing in on Bermuda. Hurricane Julia was beginning a big curve northward and a tropical depression called 94L was building in strength, but firmly expected to curve north as well and pass the east coast of North America far out to sea.
It has been an active tropical season and, with record high sea temperatures and three Category 4 storms at one time, one not to ignore. Climatologists are ever closer to understanding the cycles of the storms and the conditions that favor them, but predictions are still predictions.
By Tuesday morning of this week, 94L had become Tropical Storm Lisa and the concurrence of various computer models as to its guidance had changed to a widely scattered set of possibilities. Meanwhile in the Caribbean, a new system, 95L, is building fast into another cyclone.
Neither of the storms brewing is expected to reach our coast, but experience tells us that this part of the tropical season should be of particular interest to residents of our portion of the Piedmont. Fall is often when disturbances coming off the coast of Africa and passing near the Cape Verdes draw a bead on the Americas.
In our local history, the glorious weather we experience in late summer and early fall is sometimes interrupted by calamitous winds and rain. During the later half of the 20th century, three powerful late season storms – Fran (Sept. 5, 1996), Hazel (Oct. 15, 1954) and Floyd (Sept. 16, 1999) – became part of the permanent lore of southern Orange County. Anyone who experienced them has a memory of sound and sight that is unforgettable.
With great fury
By the time Hurricane Hazel reached Orange County on the afternoon of Oct. 15, the storm’s forward motion had increased substantially since having hit the coast near the North Carolina-South Carolina border as a Category 4 storm. Although the eye passed 30 miles to the east, winds at the university water plant were clocked at 68 miles per hour with gusts much higher. Heavy rain bands dumped 4.57 inches in a little more than an hour. The temperature dropped from 75 to 51 degrees.
Hazel’s visit was violent but, unlike the two big storms in the 1990s, mercifully brief. Accounts tell of the storm roaring through town.
Helen Giduz, her husband, Roland, and their 2-year-old son, Bill, were sitting down to lunch at their dining room table, which looked out on the front yard on their Roosevelt Drive home. Hazel arrived quickly and with great fury, Helen Giduz said.
“I remember the pine trees were doubled over,†she said. “They didn’t break like the big heavy trees that were pulled up by the roots.â€
Her husband, the editor of the newly established Chapel Hill News Leader, finished lunch, grabbed his camera and went out, much to his wife’s protest. Fortunately, she said, the storm did not last long. Hazel was on the way to an historic encounter with Virginia and much of Orange County was a wreck.
Roland Giduz drove all over the area documenting downed trees and smashed automobiles, as did his counterpart at The Chapel Hill Weekly, Louis Graves. Suburbs like Dogwood Acres had lost power to the community well, and in the fast-growing Glen Lennox it took a day to reopen the main roads.
Downtown lost a number of trees, including an oak at the chancellor’s house that several years prior had been estimated by botanist William Coker to be at least 330 years old.
Helen Giduz said she spent most of her time during Hazel trying to make sure her young son was comforted. When she got out to see the damage, it was stunning. Her husband’s well-known photo of a smashed roadster on Rosemary Street says it all, she said.
“Town was just devastated. That photo was what it was like all over.â€
Some found solace in the quiet, star-filled skies.
“It was a beautiful night Saturday night with the stars and the moon the only light on the street,†Clair Russell wrote in the Weekly.
Three days later, utility superintendent Gray Culbreth reported that 90 percent of households had power back on, but that the 5,500 customers of the Chapel Hill Telephone Company might have to wait another week.
A very long night
Hurricane Fran arrived at the North Carolina coast near Cape Fear as a strong Category 3 after lollygagging its way across the Atlantic through much of late August and early September. Its forward motion and intensity picked up, but it took the storm about six hours to travel from Wilmington to the Triangle along a route that basically paralleled I-40. Tropical storm-force winds extended more than 100 miles from the eye. Although it rapidly weakened over land, Fran was still at about Category 1 strength when it moved through town in the early morning hours of Sept. 6.
Much of the coast had already received a strong blow in the 1996 season from Hurricane Bertha, but Bertha had stayed east of the Piedmont. There had been heavy thunderstorms in the days before Fran and when the hurricane churned through the ground was already saturated, making more trees vulnerable to high winds.
Among the losses tallied that evening were dozens of the hardwoods downtown that had survived Hazel.
Dave Robertson, who had been preparing for a night of music and reverie at Local 506, was among those watching the storm hit, with particular attention on the big oak out front on Franklin Street. The roots of the tree bulged under the sidewalk as it swayed in the wind. With power out at the club and an informal hurricane party watching the debris blow down the street, the band Puritan Rodeo decided to make a run for it and head on to its next gig.
“It was a good thing they did, because that tree came down right where their van was parked,†Robertson said.
Throughout the night, the club served as temporary shelter and vantage point for anyone adventurous enough to be heading down the sidewalk or fooled by the calm of as the eye as it passed over southern Orange County.
Driving through downtown Chapel Hill the next morning was like negotiating a maze of wires and downed trees.
Near the university co-generation plant, Cameron Avenue was completely obscured by a mass of downed trees. Historic North Campus was covered in debris, and the university canceled classes so students could help with the removal.
Downtown had intermittent pockets of power and some businesses were able to open, including Caribou Coffee, where there was evidence that the deprivation of java was a major concern among the storm-weary residents. The line snaked down Franklin Street and at times rounded the corner at Columbia Street.
At the corner of Columbia and Franklin streets, employees at Copytron, which had only lost power for an hour during the storm, used a hastily purchased coffeemaker from the open but damaged Rite Aid and some borrowed beans from the powerless Lizard & Snake across the street to contribute to the flow of morning joe.
The sound of chainsaws rang out for months afterward and it took more than a week for many areas in town to get power back on. Just as in Hazel, the dark nights were memorable.
And as with the earlier storm, the community seemed to adapt quickly. The evening after Fran, generators powered the 25 television sets showing the Carolina-Houston football game at the North Carolina Sports Bar on Franklin Street. Next door, Local 506 had one last show before shutting down for a week while power was restored. The Cashmere Jungle Lords played a lovely acoustic set lit by candles.
The big rains
Fran taught a lot of lessons. In the aftermath of the storm, local governments and the Orange Water and Sewer Authority and power companies reviewed a number of policies, including clearing power cuts, debris removal and undergrounding utilities. In the years to come, the towns and OWASA greatly increased their emergency-generator capacity.
Those preparations, and fresh memories of the 1996 season, made the arrival of Floyd in 1999 more manageable. But like its predecessors, the slow-moving storm dumped massive amounts of rain on eastern and central North Carolina. And southern Orange County lost more hardwoods.
The residual affects of Floyd proved more devastating. Whole communities along the swelling eastern rivers and tributaries were destroyed and later abandoned. Hundreds of local volunteers headed east to volunteer with a massive recovery effort.
In Hillsborough and Durham, flooding along the Eno River and its tributaries was widespread.
Floyd also left the state’s finances in tatters, leading to a round of heavy budget cuts and tax increases and leaving the state ill-prepared for the economic downturn two years later.
We have been spared of late, but history says the conditions will once again steer something our way. We can prepare and predict, but not alter the path of a storm. And unless you’ve ridden one out, experiencing, hour on hour, the sound of howling winds mixed with branches cracking and pine cones hitting the side of the house at the speed of a major-league fastball, you’ll just have to take the rest of us at our word. It’s something we’ll never forget.