Hugo

Hugo

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nance Supervisor Doug Bywaters said his crews were prepared with chainsaws and barricades to warn motorists of road hazards. Since Friday was a normal workday, he added, no extra crews were needed.

Skyline Drive was closed on Friday, as park officials expected that high winds would bring down trees across the road, posing a hazard to motorists. The park arranged for rangers to escort groups of cars along the Drive, but would not allow unescorted motorists onto the federal parkway.

The alert became moot, however, when Hugo’s behavior changed as it came ashore around midnight Thursday over Charleston, South Carolina.

According to Chip Knappenberger, a research assistant at the State Climatology Office at the University of Virginia, the storm track which projected Hugo’s path over Central Virginia was based on a combination of the storm’s forward movement to the west and its intersection with a trough in the jet stream, which drew it northward.

However, the track issued by the National Hurricane Center Thursday evening was based on the hurricane’s speed over the Atlantic as it neared land.

The projection. was thrown off, Mr. Knappenberger said, when Hugo unexpectedly picked up speed as it made landfall at Charleston. At a speed of between 35 and 40 miles per hour, Hugo travelled farther west than predicted before the jet stream began drawing it north.

Thus, the rain and high winds predicted for the Piedmont were spent in the mountains of North Carolina and Southwest Virginia instead, Mr. Knappenberger explained.

The hurricane’s path through the mountains, the meterologist explained, also helped to break up its wind and rain patterns so the rainfall and wind speeds were significantly lower than predicted. “After it got past Charlotte, North Carolina, where it did significant damage, Hugo didn’t do nearly as much damage as predicted.

“We were very fortunate that it did that,” Mr. Knappenberger added, “but Central Virginia’s meteorologists got burned in the process.” He said that forecasters are extremely wary about issuing the kind of “gloom and doom” predictions made last Thursday night. “Rarely do you see alarmist forecasts, because we don’t want to scare people. But the potential for a real disaster was there. ”

The forecasting and tracking of Hugo was “done well,” he said, and the storm warnings and evacuations implemented along the Atlantic coast “saved hundreds of lives there . . . Hugo demonstrated that people should listen to the forecasters -that hurricanes are killers.”