Hurricane Bertha Hits North Carolina, 20 Years Ago

Last week was the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Bertha. Making landfall as a Category 2 storm in southeast North Carolina on July 12, she killed two people and caused $335 million in damage. Worse, she was the 2nd of 4 tropical systems to affect the area that season, the largest of which (Hurricane Fran) would land less than two months later.

In July 1996, I was just a year out of college and had started my first weather website. When she approached the North Carolina shore, I hopped into my car with my VHS camcorder and drove towards the storm, meeting her in Kinston, North Carolina (the first time I had storm chased a hurricane).

This was my first hurricane chase, and I learned a lot from it. I traveled from my home in Raleigh, NC to Kinston attempting to document the storm (see map below), but quickly ran out of VHS tapes. Power was out and stores were closed, so I had to drive all the way back to Goldsboro late in the day to buy new ones, by which time the storm was taking off to the Northeast.

Twenty years later, I've not been able to locate the first part of those tapes. I did recently find "Part 2" in Goldsboro, but it wasn't very interesting. More exciting than my storm chase footage was this coverage from national and local television stations, which I recorded on my VCR:

The NWS in Wilmington, NC has an excellent Hurricane Bertha page, curated this year by my college buddy Tim Armstrong. It includes radar loops, newspaper captures, and other YouTube videos.