Storm chaser recounts experience pursuing slow-moving Hurricane Debby

AccuWeather

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.

Transcript

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.

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