From damaging winds in Florida to coastal erosion in Delaware, AccuWeather's Bill Wadell looks back at the varied impacts of this year's hurricane season.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Accuweather's Bill Waddell was out in the wind and rain covering all the big storms this year.
00:06 Bill, you know, we warned people that Florida was in the danger this season and they took one of the hardest hits.
00:13 Listen, we didn't have a lot of impacts along the U.S., thankfully, but one of the biggest was Edalia.
00:22 Absolutely, yeah, that was the big storm.
00:24 It put so many people on alert from Tampa Bay all the way to the big bend of Florida.
00:29 I know you spoke with Reid Timmer earlier. He was down by the coast.
00:32 We know that part of the Gulf of Mexico is so vulnerable to storm surge.
00:36 So I was working with storm chaser Mike Scantlin and we set up about 20 miles inland in the Perry area.
00:43 So we didn't see storm surge there.
00:45 What we saw was a lot of wind from Edalia bringing down those really tall pine trees in the big bend of Florida.
00:51 You'll see the video. We had trees coming down on houses, blocking roads, and especially those little coastal towns.
00:58 There's only one road in and out.
01:00 So that's why evacuations were so important this time around.
01:03 And we spoke with a volunteer search and rescue member right after landfall.
01:08 He told us he was surprised and relieved that so many people followed those evacuation orders.
01:14 There were very few rescues.
01:15 And he says a lot of lessons were learned after Hurricane Ian hammered the Fort Myers Beach area last year.
01:21 He was just so thankful that people listened to the warnings and they got out before landfall.
01:27 Then later it was New England that was put on alert.
01:31 I'll tell you what, it was Hurricane Lee that moved up the eastern seaboard.
01:35 That was a pretty difficult forecast.
01:36 Now eventually there was not a landfall in the United States.
01:40 It was in Nova Scotia.
01:42 Dr. Reid Timmer was on Nova Scotia for that.
01:45 But along Cape Cod and eastern parts of Maine there were impacts.
01:49 Oh definitely Bernie.
01:52 Yeah, Tony Lahlbeck was in Maine.
01:54 I was in Cape Cod.
01:56 And we saw a lot of wind, a lot of rough surf.
02:00 Thankfully that storm stayed far enough offshore that we did not see a lot of major impacts.
02:05 We did see some isolated power outages from tree limbs coming down, power lines coming down.
02:10 But that storm was really an important reminder for people in New England
02:16 that hurricanes, tropical threats, they are possible up there.
02:19 They don't happen all that often.
02:21 But when they do, they can cause some big issues.
02:23 So it's important for people in that part of the country to be prepared,
02:27 especially for next hurricane season.
02:28 But they really dodged a bullet.
02:30 And beyond some rough wind, rough surf, a lot of people in Cape Cod looked out.
02:34 Didn't have to deal with much damage.
02:35 And then we had the classic subtropical development where you get these upper level lows.
02:41 They come off the southeast coast.
02:43 I remember we were on this one.
02:45 And it turned into tropical storm Ophelia, one of those upper lows.
02:48 And it almost was a hurricane as it made landfall in North Carolina.
02:52 Now, we sent you north to the Delaware Coast on the northern side.
02:56 And boy, there was a lot of problems with storm surge there.
02:59 Absolutely.
03:01 A lot of storm surge, a lot of coastal flooding in those low-lying spots,
03:05 especially in Bethany Beach, where we were doing our live reports that morning during the storm.
03:10 Those typical low-lying areas saw a lot of flooding.
03:14 And when you have that mix of freshwater and saltwater,
03:16 that's a whole other combination of problems if it makes it into buildings
03:20 or you have those floodwaters getting up underneath the cars.
03:23 The big story in Delaware was that coastal erosion.
03:26 That has been an issue, Bernie, for a long time in Delaware.
03:30 And this storm washed away a lot of sand.
03:33 Delaware invested millions of dollars hauling in tons of fresh sand this past spring and summer
03:39 to refresh and rejuvenate those beaches.
03:42 A lot of that was all washed away in just a matter of 48 hours.
03:46 And they've still got some cleaning up to do and probably a lot of beach renourishment
03:51 that's going to have to happen before the next tourist season,
03:54 before all the families try to return to the beaches in Delaware next summer.
03:58 And as we look back, Bill, your biggest takeaway of the season?
04:01 My biggest takeaway was that we did see some big impacts,
04:07 but we saw a lot of lessons learned after last year
04:10 and I think back to the 2020 hurricane season that was just awful.
04:14 Some of the hardest things is to get people to evacuate early,
04:17 to take those precautions early.
04:19 And we heard that from a number of first responders and local leaders,
04:22 is that thankfully this hurricane season people paid attention,
04:26 people prepared, people got out of the way.
04:28 And Bernie, I'm glad there's not much more damage
04:30 because we know insurance rates are already high.
04:33 They could have gone a lot higher if we saw multiple regions with big damage this year.
04:37 All right, thanks, Bill.
04:38 Well, more on the impacts and lessons learned from this hurricane season tonight
04:42 on AccuWeather Prime.