This top storm chaser rode out Zeta from the porch of a MS Coast ‘hurricane house’
He goes by “iCyclone” and is one of the world’s top storm chasers. And he chose to ride out powerful Hurricane Zeta on the front porch of his Bay St. Louis rental home.
Josh Morgerman, who travels around the world to penetrate eye walls of powerful hurricanes and typhoons, first left the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the Yucatan Peninsula to feel the hurricane’s wrath and report to his 114,000 Twitter followers.
But Zeta didn’t explode in Mexico. He realized while he was there that “the real story” would be back in the U.S., he told the Sun Herald.
After experiencing landfall there, he rushed back to Bay St. Louis house. And Zeta wasn’t far behind him.
Just hours after he arrived on the Coast, the fast-moving Category 2 storm roared across South Mississippi, with wind gusts of above 100 mph.
Many across the Coast were surprised by the strength of the storm. Morgerman said a major brunt of the blame for the surprise was fatigue. The Mississippi Coast has been in the cone of uncertainty seven times this season, and Morgerman believes that all of those near-misses took a toll on Gulf Coast residents.
Zeta’s intensity forecast also changed quickly, Morgerman said. The storm was initially projected to encounter wind shear in the Gulf and make landfall in Louisiana as a Category 1 hurricane before weakening to a tropical storm while impacting Mississippi.
Instead, it passed through the Mississippi Coast as a near-Category 3 hurricane.
Morgerman, who lives in California and is staying in Bay St. Louis for the 2020 hurricane season, said Zeta had the “most significant hurricane impact on the Mississippi Coast since Katrina.”
Next door, a tree fell onto his neighbor’s home and crushed their roof. No one was injured, Morgerman said. Down the street from Morgerman, a historic Black blues hall that was restored after Hurricane Katrina suffered serious roof damage.
Across the Coast, Hurricane Zeta tore down trees, ripped apart power lines and flooded low-lying areas. Boats in harbors washed ashore along U.S. 90. A home fell from its pilings in Bay St. Louis with two people inside. Thousands were without power as crews worked around the clock to fix transformers and light polls to hundreds of thousands of residents. Some are still waiting for power to be restored.
Despite the significant damage he has seen in Bay St. Louis, Josh is confident in the Coast’s ability to fight back, calling Mississippians “pros” at recovering from storm destruction. Earlier this summer, he told the Sun Herald the immense hurricane knowledge of Gulf Coast residents has been one of his favorite parts of calling Bay St. Louis home for this season.
“I realized what was going to make this experience special for me was to ride it (Zeta) out at the place I now call home.”
Morgerman will spend the next few days cleaning up fallen branches at his “hurricane house” and enjoying what he hopes will be no-chasing downtime for the final month of his stay in Mississippi.
