Hurricane Fran in Cary, N.C., 1996, by khilgers
From MemoryArchive
Who: Kevin Hilgers, student What: Hurricane Fran Where: Cary, North Carolina When: September 1996
Hurricanes are often hyped by the local news and pass over without much problem. But when I was in seventh grade and Hurricane Fran put the Raleigh, N.C., area out of commission for a week, my family took a different attitude toward big storms.
It was a Thursday night and I was watching the bottle deposit episode of Seinfeld. It was an hour-long episode, but being 12, my mom made me go to bed in the middle of the episode at 9:30 p.m. Little did we know that after that evening schools would be closed for more than a week. It would also turn out that I'd be one of the few people who slept that night.
I woke up the next morning and the power was out. I went outside and the clump of pines in the front yard had crashed over the driveway. It was the same way throughout the neighborhood. Powerlines were in tangles on the main roads. It was a surprise: The Triangle is more than a 100 miles from the coast. But the eye passed directly over my town, so we took a beating. There was no flooding near me, but the front page of the News and Observer had a picture water in downtown Raleigh rising to the top of street signs.
We didn't have electricity for more than 80 hours. That meant playing cards by candlelight, going to bed when it got dark in a hot, humid house. We grilled for every meal to save whatever we could from the freezer. There were runs on ice to keep cold whatever couldn't be eaten. Few places had ice. I remember going to dozens of stores with empty cases where the ice used to be. We had to drive 20 miles to Durham before we found some.
The power finally came back on for us, but we were lucky. Other people had to wait almost a whole week.
School eventually restarted, but we had missed six days of class -- all to be made up where summer break should have started.
Three years later, with Fran still fresh in our minds, we stayed vigilant all night for the coming of Hurricane Floyd. It spared us, but I still don't forget that hurricanes can be serious business.
