Hurricane winds blow through Ohio, not an ocean in sight

BY EILEEN BRADY
​THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

Emily nearly kept my fiancé from making it to our wedding in 1993.
Just three years after the honeymoon, Bertha tried her best to destroy our new house. Her big sister Fran blew into town two months later, crashing through our fence and taking several prized pecan trees with her. 
A Category 3 hurricane, Fran was a monster storm that killed 27 people overall and destroyed 696 homes in our North Carolina county alone. The only reason Fran was not even more destructive was because Hurricane Bertha, also arriving in the summer of 1996, had essentially cleared the way weeks earlier. Sneaky Emily had brushed the Outer Banks before heading back to sea, so the military gave the go-ahead for my fiancé to travel to his own wedding.
Bertha, a Category 2 storm and the first hurricane I’d ever lived through, felt more like an extreme, long-lasting Ohio thunderstorm. It also seemed to forge a oceanic path

for dozens of subsequent East Coast hurricanes, ending a 36-year lull as it became the first full-fledged hurricane to directly hit the North Carolina coast since Donna in 1960. 

Our friends who lived with their young children in a mobile home on Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base hunkered down for both hurricanes at our off-base house, playing Yahtzee by candlelight to calm nerves. Our inland home had stood standing since the late 1800s, so we figured its odds were better than something put together in a factory in the 1980s. 
My husband already had a healthy respect for hurricanes, ever since he flew into Okinawa in 1991 during Typhoon Kinna, as part of an airline’s misguided attempt to “outrun” the storm. Airplanes and typhoons do not play well together, and even the crew was terrified.
Bertha’s 100-mph winds sounded as if they would peel off our metal roof like a sardine can. Fran roared as if it would peel the entire house from its foundation. But we were lucky. We survived mostly unscathed.
But those storms destroyed building, roads and lives. I can still picture the refrigerators floating next to upside-down fishing boats and cars that had been tossed into the water like Matchbox toys.
Hurricane winds uprooted many of the Bradford pear trees planted near the Marine base in honor of each of the 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors killed in the Beirut bombing in 1983. A local car dealership quickly raised the money to replace the memorial trees, but it was another loss those families shouldn’t have had to bear.
What I know from the post-hurricane months (and years) is that the American Red Cross, chartered by the U.S. Congress and sustained with donations, appears in a disaster area even faster than the TV news satellite trucks and the Davey Tree bucket trucks that stream in on the highways. I also know that long after most of the outside help and attention has turned elsewhere, coastal communities struggle to rebuild.
We survived those major hurricanes, and minor ones in other places, which I reminded myself Monday night as gusts up to 40 mph battered our house in Clinton County, 600 miles from the nearest coast. Just as I have done for countless hurricanes over the past 16 years, I carefully tracked the official hurricane symbol, the one that looks like combative commas. 
I’d never had to worry about wind-chill factors during hurricane spin-up, though.
Hurricane Sandy was predicted to be extremely dangerous and was threatening friends and family in Washington, D.C., and New York City, which worried me even more. A first-grade friend of ours, Liem, heard the storm news near D.C. and said he found it hard to believe it would be bad because “‘Sandy’ sounds like she’d be a nice woman.” He had a point. “If they really wanted us to be worried, they should call it ‘Hurricane House-Destroyer’ or something like that.”
Adding “Superstorm” before “Sandy” certainly helps make it a more appropriate moniker.
I calmed my nerves by following the pre-disaster protocol of heading to the grocery store, ready to grab the last of the bottled water and bread -- a half-baked move in a landlocked Ohio town. The Kroger shelves were fully stocked late that afternoon. 
That’s not to say Ohio hasn’t been affected over the years by its share of hurricanes and hurricane-created weather.
The path of Hurricane Katrina, the costliest U.S. hurricane, went directly through Clinton County in 2005, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Since 1888, more than 15 hurricane paths have come within 100 miles of Wilmington. 
Usually, Ohio feels the effects of far-away hurricanes in the heavy rain that they bring. But the biggest impact came in 2008, without much rain, when Hurricane Ike’s winds caused $1.1 billion in damage to our state.
Growing up, I’d sometimes question why I was called a Hurryin’ Hurricane, but it makes a little more sense these days.