Weather
By Dan Skeldon
A lot happens in 10 years.
Over the last whirlwind decade, I got married to my beautiful wife, rescued two loving dogs, and have been blessed with two adorable daughters. We’ve lived in four houses, the current our hopeful forever home.
Even more happens in 24 years. That’s how long I’ve been a meteorologist, forecasting countless blizzards, nor’easters, severe thunderstorms, and even a tornado or two from the Great Lakes to New England to the South Jersey shore.
Yes, time changes many things. People, places, and memories inevitably come and go. But it’s not an exaggeration to state that no one who lived along our shore in late October of 2012 will ever forget where they were when Hurricane Sandy made landfall in South Jersey on the evening of Monday, October 29. To me, it rivals the derecho, just four months prior, as one of the two most memorable events in my decades long meteorology career. Let’s put that memory to the test:
-Friday, October 19th, 2012
My long-awaited week-long “staycation” begins, as I’m scheduled to be off from my job as chief meteorologist at NBC40 through the next week. With no travel plans, I was looking forward to enjoying my favorite time of the year in my Ocean City home, with daily trips to the beach with my dog Bailey.
-Monday, October 22nd, 2012
While I should be “disconnected” from forecasting with my vacation underway, my attention remains fixed on a newly named Tropical Storm, Sandy, in the southwest Caribbean. Although it was a minimal tropical storm and almost 2,000 miles away, I had a bad feeling in my gut. And computer model guidance was already suggesting this storm could spell trouble for the East Coast.
-Wednesday, October 24th, 2012
That bad feeling only grew stronger, enough for me to cancel the rest of my vacation, and head back to work to warn of the potential impacts that existed with Sandy. After little warning from the devastating derecho that June, it was my intent to use the advances in hurricane forecasting to provide as much warning as possible ahead of what could be just as destructive a storm, this time for the shore more so than the mainland.
-Friday, October 26th, 2012
Unfortunately, Hurricane Sandy now seemed locked in for a landfall along the Northeast coast early the following week. The science was very good. The forecasts from local and national meteorologists were informative and accurate, some of the best I’ve seen in my career. The challenge, however, was getting residents to realize that Sandy WAS NOT Irene, a hurricane that struck just over a year earlier. While Irene brought widespread destruction to areas to our south, west, and north (as far north as Vermont!), a complex combination of factors allowed South Jersey to escape “relatively” unscathed. It’s human nature to believe that the next hurricane will be similar to the last one, and overcoming that myth was the biggest challenge I and other meteorologists faced in the days leading up to Sandy’s landfall. In fact, human nature is still something we haven’t overcome in acting on weather forecasts even today.
-Saturday, October 27th, 2012
With 48 hours until landfall and realizing there was no escaping the harsh reality that ground zero would be somewhere along the New Jersey shore, I storm proofed my Ocean City home as much as I could, and evacuated my girlfriend Amanda (now my wife) and my dog Bailey to safety farther inland. I then enjoyed a big breakfast at my favorite breakfast place on the island, Ready’s, and headed to work for what I knew would be a very long but possibly career-defining stretch.
-Sunday, October 28th, 2012
I take up shelter in the Linwood studios of NBC40, my temporary address for the next four days as it would turn out. The first of many rounds of tidal flooding begin, the rain bands and occasionally gusty winds do as well. I issue final pleas to heed evacuation orders on our barrier islands. Around the clock coverage on air and over my Twitter and Facebook feeds begins in earnest, well minus cat naps when I could sneak one in. I think it ended up being 6 hours of sleep in three to four days total.
-Monday, October 29th, 2012
It would take an entire month of columns to do the day that Sandy made landfall justice. Non-stop coverage on air and online, to the point where I could hardly talk anymore, made the day seemingly a blur. Of course, I was in a windowless weather center, safely on the mainland, although the waters of Patcong Creek rose ominously close to our studios Monday night. But for those that were surrounded by a deadly storm surge and hurricane force winds on our barrier islands, minutes likely felt like hours. While the satellites, radars, and weather observations I had been providing all day told a tale of destruction, it was the pictures and videos that flooded my social media feeds and email inboxes that left me speechless and heartbroken. As a scientist and broadcaster, a television meteorologist tries to deliver the most accurate information to his or her audience impartially and ideally without hype, to hopefully save lives and allow viewers to make the best decisions. But when it was my entire viewing audience, not to mention my home too, that was the focus of Sandy’s wrath, it’s hard not to be moved, and feel even a greater sense of connection with the community.
Part 2 will come in my next column, reflecting how South Jersey was indeed stronger than the storm, and how Sandy’s worst brought out the best in so many of us.
Meteorologist Dan Skeldon has a degree in meteorology from Cornell University. He has forecasted the weather in South Jersey for the last 18 years, first on the former television station NBC40 and then on Longport Media radio. Dan has earned the American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval for Broadcast Meteorologists, and now does television broadcasts on WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.
