Nature's Day of Reckoning

When hurricane forecasters first named Hurricane Opal, it was basically a formality in the second-most active hurricane season in history. Opal seemed like just another weak, underdeveloped late-season storm.
But on the night of Oct. 4, 1995, Hurricane Opal cut a wide swath of destruction in the Wiregrass, pounding the area for more than five hours with winds in excess of 80 mph, before heading north and causing more than $200 million of damage in Alabama alone.
The more than $2 billion of damage Hurricane Opal left in Alabama and Florida made it the third most costly hurricane in history, behind Andrew in 1992 and Hugo in 1989.
Today, The Dothan Eagle remembers the impact the hurricane made on the Wiregrass during the first week of October 1995.

The first week of October 1995 began like any other autumn week in the Wiregrass.
The announcement of the O.J. Simpson Trial verdict on Tuesday, Oct. 3 competed for some of the usual fall conversation with football, festivals, and school. But mostly, people were just busy with their own lives.
Jim Dennis and his wife were anticipating the birth of their first child and Lenard Windham was trying to help organize Ozark's first rodeo scheduled for the weekend.
A Dothan country radio station was gearing up for Wednesday night's Country Music Association Awards. Jeffrey and Paige Dulac had just remodeled their kitchen.
No one gave much thought to the storm making its way through the Gulf of Mexico and quietly mustering unprecedented strength.
By Tuesday afternoon, Hurricane Opal had taken precedence over everything, rudely changing thoughts, schedules and plans a day before its 80-plus mph winds, altered area buildings and landscape, turning the week upside down for Mrs. Dulac and everyone else.
"I was hearing reports the storm was going to hit, and I felt kind of silly because I had never experienced anything like this," Mrs. Dulac said.
"I told our cleaning lady I had to run to the store because I needed more ice and things like that, and I came back and really felt foolish."
Literally overnight, the hurricane had picked up its forward speed in the Gulf of Mexico and dramatically dropped its barometric pressure.
The drama began Tuesday as the storm continued its path toward the Florida Panhandle.
Wiregrass American Red Cross chapter director Mary Turner calls her volunteers.
At Flowers Hospital, Randy Taylor checks the parking lot to remove any loose objects that could become flying debris, while Dennis does the same at Extendicare Health Center.
The Extendicare assistant administrator has other concerns: his wife is eight months, three weeks pregnant and her doctor tells the couple that the drop in barometric pressure that accompanies a hurricane can sometimes cause premature labor. Kaitlyn Dennis is born nine days after the hurricane on Oct. 13, a day after her parents attended Bob Dylan's hurricane relief concert in the Dothan Civic Center.
Meanwhile, Windham makes storm preparations on his 2,500-acre Skipperville farm. He feeds the cattle early in the day, so they will be on safer ground among the trees during the storm. He also puts all loose objects in the barns and nails down the roofs of his chicken houses.
The real fun begins in Wednesday's early morning hours when a 1:45 a.m. telephone call interrupts Mrs. Turner's sleep, summoning her, disaster services director Irene Hearn and other officials to a meeting at Dothan-Houston County Emergency Management Agency at 2 a.m.
At 8, the first shelter in the area opens at Westgate Recreation Center and the first evacuees begin arriving at 11.
At 9, Hot Country 96.9, which one day earlier had been planning a major promotional contest in conjunction with Wednesday night's Country Music Awards, begins broadcasting hurricane updates every 15 minutes.
By early afternoon, store shelves begin to empty as residents were snatching all the fresh water, batteries and other supplies needed to ride out the storm. Lines of cars are on the highways, especially U.S. 231 South, and at gas pumps.
Emergency rooms are busy during the day, treating accident victims trying to get as far north as possible ahead of the storm. Hospital activity decreases as the hurricane draws closer, said Janie Powell, Marilyn McKissack and Jennifer Johnson, patient care services director, emergency room manager and manager of labor and delivery, respectively.
Meanwhile, the weather had deteriorated. A tornado touches down in Cottonwood and another funnel cloud is spotted near Daleville at Cairns Army Airfield.
At 3 p.m., 96.9 plays its last record and begins wall-to-wall hurricane coverage.
A second shelter opens at 4 p.m. at the Dothan Civic Center. The city's two main shelters - the civic center and Westgate - sheltered more than 700 people that night.
The eye of Hurricane Opal hits Hurlburt Field, near Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., at 5 p.m., packing wind gusts of up to 144 mph. The storm still has much of that punch when it hits the Wiregrass.
By 7 p.m., Opal knocks out electrical power in the area and begins a five-hour assault on the Wiregrass with winds in excess of 80 mph.
In downtown Dothan, as power is interrupted across the Wiregrass, The Dothan Eagle's presses start printing Thursday morning's edition - some five hours earlier than normal in an effort to beat the possible power outage. As the winds and rain pound the area, the newspaper is able to successfully complete its entire press run and newspapers are delivered with few delays across the area as residents survey the damage at sunrise.
Not long after the heaviest winds hit the area, the Dulacs lose one of their two trees at their Girard Avenue home in Dothan. Later that night, they find an oak tree had crashed on top of their carport.
In Headland, a tornado dropped a pecan tree on Dennis Daughtry's mobile home while he's sleeping in the back bedroom about 8:30 p.m. He rushed outside to disconnect his electricity, gas and water and rode out the rest of the storm at a neighbor's home. For months after the hurricane, Daughtry would live in a tent while awaiting FEMA assistance.
During the worst of the storm, the only connection to the outside world is the radio and only two stations were able to continue broadcasting throughout the night. WDJR uses the services of Tom Nebel (then at WTVY and now the station's general manager) and begins taking calls from residents throughout the Wiregrass reporting conditions and damage in their area.
"I'm in Dothan," one of the station's more than 500 callers that night tells WDJR's Jerry Broadway and Mitch English. "It's raining really hard. The wind is blowing. There are trees down. I can tell the power lines are down."
After WTVY was knocked off the air for what is believed to be the first time in the station's 40-year history, Nebel started doing full-time breaks with WDJR. After 7:30 p.m., he remained on the line for the next five hours.
Three or four times during the night, Broadway braves the winds to re-fuel WDJR's generator.
"You haven't lived until you've poured gas in a generator with the wind blowing 90 mph," Broadway said. "But it was scary enough just being in here listening to the wind howl and when our heavy, metal back door blew off between 10-11, it sounded like someone had fired a shotgun at the end of the hall. I thought the roof had caved in on us.
"It was the longest night I've ever spent with the exception of the night my first child was born. It was just a wild night. I'm glad I had the opportunity to do it and I hope I never have the opportunity again."
The next day, crews are busy on the streets with clean-up as residents do the same at their homes. There is little damage to Windham's and wife Bonn's home.
His farm is another story. When he inspects the damage at 4 a.m., following the hurricane, Windham finds one of his 300 cows has been killed, along with almost 2,000 of his 9,000 chickens. There was damage to the roofs of all 10 of his chicken houses. Windham later found a hay barn had been blown into the highway.
"That night, sitting at the house listening to the wind, I had absolutely no idea it was that bad," Windham said. "We had hardly a limb fall out of our pecan trees there. But everywhere else, it was just devastating."
In the shelters, people no longer in fear for their lives now turn their anxieties toward their homes and loved ones.
It was now a matter of cleaning up the damage and trying to get life back to normal. High school football games were played that Friday night and Ozark held its jamboree and rodeo that weekend.

Hunters Knew Opal Would Pack An Awesome Punch

Only the most obsessed hurricane watchers had Opal on their minds in the Wiregrass in late September last year.
But 1st Lt. Scott Spitzer and The Hurricane Hunters were seeing something drastically different from their vantage point inside the hurricane.
Opal was not the comparatively minor minnow the National Hurricane Center was seeing in its forecasts, but a killer shark of a hurricane.
The data the crews from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron provided the hurricane center from inside the eye of Hurricane Opal showed that practically overnight, it had developed from a Category 2 storm to a monster with winds approaching 150 mph.
"With Opal, the drop in pressure was the thing for us," Spitzer said.
"There is usually a couple of millibars drop in about a day. That was happening by the hour in that storm. I imagine the National Hurricane Center was pretty awake that night."
Opal, the first hurricane to sweep directly through the Wiregrass since 1985, caused more than $1.5 million in damage in Houston County alone. At least nine area counties and 38 Alabama counties were declared disaster areas. In all, Opal was responsible for $3 billion in damage in the U.S., Guatemala and Mexico.
For The Hurricane Hunters, penetrating the eye of the hurricane has been compared with the exhilaration of a wartime kill for a fighter pilot. During 1995, Spitzer's first hurricane season, he netted a phenomenal 64 penetrations.
In high school, Spitzer became interested in tropical weather after Hurricane Elena flirted with the coastline in his hometown Pensacola , Fla., before coming ashore in Mississippi in 1985.
For some, the thought of flying into hurricanes such as Opal and Erin probably seems more like suicide than a job. But The Hurricane Hunters have a phenomenal success and safety record. Spitzer, the son of the late Col. William Spitzer, a 30-year Air Force pilot, downplays the danger.
"A lot of people consider this a dangerous mission, but a lot of times I think the guys in Bosnia have a far more dangerous mission," Spitzer said. "Because nobody is shooting at us.
"Everything the storm throws at us, our crews are trained to the level where we can handle it."
Since the military began hurricane reconnaissance missions in 1944, the Air Force has lost only three planes, all in typhoons in the Pacific. In that time, the Air Force Reserve aircraft have gathered inside information - literally - on some of the most intense and dangerous storms of the century, including Hurricane Camille in 1969, Hugo in 1989 and Andrew in 1992.
"There are two factors for that," said Maj. Doug Lipscombe, an aerial weather reconnaissance officer in the 53rd WRS. "Our maintenance people baby these airplanes. That's not to say the airlines don't baby theirs because they do. But because of the importance of our mission and the danger involved in flying into these storms, the maintenance people make sure the aircraft is in top condition.
"Also, our crews are trained extensively before they go out on a mission. We are very careful not to place ourselves in jeopardy. Based on past experience, we know where we can be and where we should not be."
To appreciate how important the squadron is to accurate hurricane forecasts, one need only remember the night of Oct. 4, 1995 in the Florida Panhandle and southeast Alabama.
"Opal was one of the prime examples of why we need to be out flying," Lipscombe said. "The night before Opal struck, a number of our airplanes were flying into the storm around the clock.
"Over a 12-hour stretch of time, we observed Opal go from a Category 2 hurricane with a pressure of 948 millibars and wind speeds of 105 mph to a Category 4 hurricane with a pressure of 916 millibars and wind speeds of 150 mph.
"During that time, the hurricane center said they did not observe that on satellite. Our data coming to them every 10 seconds allowed them to make the call that Opal was strengthening and speeding up, so people were evacuated earlier along the Florida coast. Because we were out there, fewer people lost their lives during Hurricane Opal," Lipscombe said.

Staring into the Enemy's Eye

TEN THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE ATLANTIC OCEAN - This enemy does not fight with rifles, Scud missiles and anti-aircraft fire, but with the elements of nature's most awesome package of destruction.
Nevertheless, the United States Air Force was summoned.
Members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at Keesler Air Force Base on the Mississippi coast took to the skies once again. Their mission was to fly directly into enemy territory, where an incredible storm boasting 100-mph winds and blinding rain persisted.
This time, the enemies were Hurricanes Edouard and Fran, with another tropical system off the coast of Africa possibly headed for a showdown with members of this squadron better known as The Hurricane Hunters.
The data taken from inside the eye of Hurricane Fran aided the Carolina coast's evacuation effort before the storm blew ashore late Thursday night.
"We're military guys, and flying into these storms has been likened to flying into combat," said Maj. Doug Lipscombe, an aerial weather reconnaissance officer.
"Military guys always want to have an enemy. Well, our enemy is the storm. So while we're out there flying into the eye, the military part of us is saying we conquered that hurricane by getting through that center and gathering all the data to tell everybody exactly what is going on inside that thing."
Riding on The Hurricane Hunters' WC-130 seems like just another flight until the aircraft reaches the hurricane's eyewall at 10,000 feet. During the 12 minutes or so in the eyewall, which can be 25 to 40 miles wide, the crew's visibility is zero. Pelted by blinding rain, hail and lightning, the durable Air Force Reserve workhorse airplane shakes and rolls inside the worst the hurricane has to offer.
The average mission entails four such penetrations of the eyewall.
"It's always the ride of a lifetime," Lipscombe said. "It's like going down a roller coaster blindfolded or down the highway 70 mph during a downpour. You want to pull over and slow down because you get that uneasy feeling.
"Well, we can't pull over and slow down. We just keep flying through that stuff."
After about 12 minutes of this barrage in the eyewall, suddenly the ride becomes smooth, almost eerily gentle. There is a mild breeze, sunshine and a blue sky above, with a whirling wall of almost heavenly white clouds all around the aircraft.
"It all depends on the storm," Lipscomb said. "Bigger storms, like Edouard, typically have well-formed eyes, and we experience what is known as a stadium effect. It's like being on the 50-yard-line of a big stadium and all you can see are seats all around. All we see are clouds going up to 40,000 to 50,000 feet.
"So we're down here at the bottom looking up and all we see are clouds and blue skies above us. At night, you can see the stars. It's a very beautiful sight and one very few people get to see."
But The Hurricane Hunters don't fly these missions for postcard views. They furnish The National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Fla., with information their satellites are unable to gather, improving hurricane forecast accuracies by more than 30 percent.
The squadron's 10 WC-130s, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's WP-3 Orions, also based in the Miami area, are the hurricane center's eyes and ears.
"The information The Hurricane Hunters bring back is very valuable," said Houston County Emergency Management Agency Director Shelby Womack. "With this information, we can tell how a storm is strengthening."
"It all boils down to credibility and risk," Lipscombe said. "If the forecast is credible, people will take less risk and vice-versa."
In 1995, the second-most active hurricane season of the century, the 53rd WRS flew more than 160 reconnaissance missions. Twelve were in the eye of Hurricane Opal, which struck the Wiregrass Oct. 4, 1995.
Using a bow-like maneuver called an alpha pattern, the WC-130 penetrates the hurricane's eye from all four quadrants of the storm.
In each section, the operator releases a cylindrical object called a dropsonde through the floor of the plane. A parachute slows the dropsonde's descent to about 1,000 feet per minute as the sensors measure the hurricane's barometric pressure, dew point and humidity.
The information is immediately processed by a computer at the rear of the aircraft and sent by satellite to the hurricane center. The airplane's Improved Weather Reconnaissance System samples the atmosphere eight times per second and averages the data every second, Lipscombe said.
When a hurricane is within 1,000 miles of where the 53rd WRS aircraft is flying, The Hurricane Hunters go to work. They began flying into Hurricane Fran from St. Croix and moved to a stateside base as the storm approached the U.S. mainland.
WC-130s have enough fuel to fly up to 14 hours, but most hurricane reconnaissance missions last between 10 to 12 hours. Approximately six of those hours are spent inside the hurricane.
"It's just like combat - you don't want innocent people to pay with their lives," Lipscombe said. "We don't want innocent people on those beaches and shore lines to pay with their lives when it comes to these storms."