Storm chaser recounts experience pursuing slow-moving Hurricane Debby
AccuWeather's Tony Laubach shares what it was like tracking Debby as the storm made landfall in Florida and then stalled out over the Southeast for days before a second landfall.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Right now we want to check in with meteorologist Tony Laubach, who has been tracking Debbie
00:03since Sunday and even earlier. And he joins us now from Augusta, Georgia,
00:08to look back on his experience. Tony, you intercepted both of Debbie's landfalls.
00:13Talk to us about the experience with them. They were very different landfalls, weren't they?
00:20They were very different and we're going to split this up here. So if you're with us next hour,
00:25we'll talk about the second landfall versus the first one. But this one truly felt more
00:30like a hurricane. Obviously, Debbie, a Category 1 hurricane when it rolled onshore in Florida there
00:37early in the morning hours. And this was actually one of the few times I have actually experienced
00:42a hurricane that rolled in essentially in the middle of the night. We're going to show you
00:46some of that video here of our intercept here. This was near Salem, Florida, where we made that
00:51original intercept in the eyewall, the northern part of that eyewall there. We had the winds
00:57gusting upwards of 80 miles per hour at times. You hear some of the background with the frogs.
01:01It was kind of an interesting thing as the eye started to work its way in and we started to
01:05calm things down quite a bit. You can hear a lot of the animals still kind of waking up there
01:11early in the morning. But after we dealt with the eyewall, things started to push on out.
01:16Debbie was a very slow mover and that kept the surge, the flooding around for quite a while.
01:20We actually had more issues, I would say, on the southern part of the eyewall, the back half of the
01:26eyewall after it rolled through with a lot of the storm surge flooding there near Horseshoe Beach.
01:30And then, of course, working our way out of the area over toward the Jacksonville area,
01:35we were dealing with all sorts of issues with blocked roads, flooded roads, mainly the damage.
01:40You see some of the damage here. A lot of the telephone poles, trees on power lines,
01:44even had a truck that ran into a tree that went down. We never heard a word on the driver there,
01:48despite doing a little bit of research trying to figure out where that was as we came to that scene
01:52several hours after the fact. But again, that was just one of the many hazards that we were
01:56dealing with there in the Florida part of the storm. Again, we worked our way with that storm
02:03up the coast. Now, typically what I've done in these intercepts a lot of times is I will follow
02:08the storm, literally kind of ride the back end of the eye up through, say, the Carolinas or into
02:14Virginia, which I did with Ian, which I did with Nicole, where we had second landfalls with those.
02:19This one, a little bit different, because the storm didn't have that forward motion,
02:24that constant movement. So there was actually a several day break, despite what would have
02:29amounted to have been a straight through drive of maybe about four and a half hours from landfall
02:34to landfall. So that was an interesting twist for sure in terms of intercepting this storm,
02:40because there was such a long wait because of how slow it was moving to go from one eyewall
02:46to the next eye intercept. And again, like previous hurricanes, like Ian, like Nicole,
02:51we had a very quick turnaround because that hurricane would wrap itself up pretty quickly.
02:57This one, much, much different. And what we did to pass the time between that, Jeff,
03:02we'll talk about in the next hour, that included something more, I guess the word would be more
03:08useful, used to for me in terms of my actual chasing. And we'll talk about that water spout
03:14and some of the flash flooding we saw coming up. All right, Tony, well, we always love the way you
03:18present it from one side of the storm to the other, and from the tropics to the severe weather
03:23in the plains. Thanks for that report. We'll look in with you again in just a little bit.