Art Bell tracks Hurricane Floyd’s 935-millibar intensity as a "monster" storm, 125 miles from Cape Canaveral, threatening 2.6 million evacuees with shifting landfall near Wilmington, NC. Callers like Angela from Cape Coral compare its scale to Hurricane Andrew using coin analogies, while Ryan suggests global webcams for real-time footage. Bell dismisses unrelated topics—like Fritz’s Arizona lightning or a caller’s aircraft sterilization claims—and corrects misattributed details about Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz’s Emerging Viruses book. He teases Whitley Strieber’s upcoming segment on The Coming Superstorm, wrapping up by urging listeners to submit storm photos via artbell.com, blending disaster prep with fringe theories and technical tangents. [Automatically generated summary]
And they've got the eye on the shorter radar, and it is awesome.
My God, that's a big I. The feeder bands are beginning to pound Northeast Florida pretty hard right now.
And it is moving northwest.
The latest information on Hurricane Floyd is it is 125 miles now, very much closer to the Cape, 125 miles actually east-southeast of Cape Canaveral, moving northwest at 13, Russia at 935 millibars, and thus far no weakening in the storm.
I see Titusville, Daytona Beach, down to Vero Beach, and Fort Pierce are feeling the feeder waves of this hurricane.
It is a monster.
2.6 million people are being evacuated.
The largest evacuation in U.S. history.
Where's it coming ashore?
Perhaps Wilmington.
Their best guess right now.
Wilmington, North Carolina.
But that changes with just about every report.
But I see them circling Wilmington right now as the most likely area.
We'll see.
We're talking about the storm, and we're into open lines.
Anything you want to talk about is fair game.
I was off of Titusville, Florida, recording 45-foot storm surges.
Holy moly.
Wonder if that's true.
45-foot storm.
Holy smokes.
And he asks, question, what happens to anyone caught in their cars on these jammed highways?
Well, if they've made it far enough west, hopefully all they have to do is sit it out.
But again, I would say to those of you getting ready to go, you're going to encounter jammed highways, number one.
Number two, gas may be difficult.
Number three, I would take whatever supplies you're able to cram in.
You know, if you've got sleeping bags, camping equipment, something to eat, you know, all that sort of thing, you'd want to get that in the car if possible if you are evacuating, if you're trying to get out of the way of this monster.
You know, a webcam's all right, but you know right now that CNN is waiting to see exactly where the storm is going to come in, and they're going to send their guy right to where the eye is going to go.
I'm still, I asked, and I'm waiting to see if they're going to email me.
Anybody at CNN or the Weather Channel, I would really like to know how you guys pick out who you're going to send down to stand in the eye.
unidentified
It sounds like it'd be a lot of fun, you know, for me anyways.
When we were in the Air Force at Amarillo, we used to chase him.
I don't know how we lived through that.
Yeah, really, you know, I joke about this, but I would volunteer.
I'd be the idiot who'd raise his hand and say, yes.
I mean, it would be exciting, in a way.
But that would be with a lesser storm.
You know, when you get something this size, you sure as hell wouldn't want to be standing on a barrier island, for example, because it might not exist.
Now, standing inland a little bit in an eye, maybe.
Well, some of them that I gave you six, eight months, a year before anybody else even brought up the subject, you gave credit to other people to your various prophets.
I'm sorry, but yes, obviously, if I have a guest on the air who's made a specific prediction, then that is memorable as well as being memorialized.
If you have just sent me a letter and said, I am a prophet of God or something or another, and I make the following predictions, it may slip through the cracks.
I'm sorry.
That is the kind of volume of mail and communication I get from all of you out there.
And I try to pay the best attention I can to it, but some of it does slip through my fingers.
One of the reasons I asked you a question, I look at your website, but the one thing I couldn't find on there was a replay from the Swiss error back to September 2nd.
Well, the first officer who called a while ago did burst some balloons for me.
No stewardesses ever in the cockpit, ever.
So I guess they have to go back and get their own coffee, huh?
I wonder how the coffee gets.
Maybe it comes in a little chute or something.
And then this sterilized business.
In other words, you're not allowed to talk about anything, the wife, the kids, nothing, just the duty at hand, which is flying.
And I suppose from the flying public's point of view, these are all good things, but it does seem like it, you know, takes a lot of the romance out of the way it used to be.
But on the other hand, maybe we have fewer crashes.
So I guess it's all right.
We're watching the hurricane with you through the night tonight, and probably tomorrow, too.
We will have Whitley here for a short time tomorrow night talking about the weather.
unidentified
I can see her lying back in her satin dress In a room where you do what you don't confess Someday you better take care If I find you been creeping around my back stairs Someday you better take care If I find you been creeping around my back stairs She's been looking
like a queen in a sailor's dream And she don't always say what she really means Sometimes I think it's a shame And I get feeling better when...
Reported that northwest of the eye wall, they had a buoy that just recorded 52-foot seas.
I repeat, 52-foot seas.
Try and let your mind imagine that.
The largest evacuation of U.S. citizens in U.S. history, 2.6 million are fleeing this storm.
The latest projections show it coming ashore at the North Carolina, South Carolina border.
But that seems to change each time they get a new forecast.
The last one seemed to show it jogging a little to the west.
You know, the last part of the little jog was toward the west.
So who knows, the ridge is weakening a little bit that would have affected the storm.
And everybody's got to be on the lookout.
And I mean everybody.
It's still east-southeast of the Cape by about 125 miles.
And it's still moving northwest as far as we know.
We should have new information soon.
Obviously, we're going to be dealing with this tonight.
Tomorrow night, we'll have Whitley Strieber here a little bit.
Whitley and I have authored a new book called The Coming Superstorm.
And the subject matter is entirely appropriate to what's going on.
So we'll have him on and talk with him a little bit.
But basically, we're going to be doing open lines so that we can kind of keep in touch with what's going on.
Now, listen, any of you out there that have appropriate photographs, personal photographs is what we really want, that have to do with this storm, we'd love to have you send them to my webmaster.
He is webmaster.
He's Romant, actually.
Webmaster at artbell.com.
So, we're looking for personally oriented type photographs.
We also have a link to the webcams in the path of the hurricane.
So, during the day, that'll be very useful.
At night, not very useful unless they've got, you know, night vision equipment.
But during the day, tomorrow, or later today now, actually, in my time zone, and yours, I'm sure, you'll be able to go to my website and look at those webcams.
It is an awesome site.
They're in the blackout zone where they don't really have new satellite information yet.
It's coming shortly on the hurricane.
But they do have it on radar.
And, woo, you ought to see the eye as defined on radar.
It is incredible.
George Kennedy for Can Doo.
Arthritis, man.
They're part of the family, right?
Well, then take food for them because likely they will need it.
And for yourself, and, you know, whatever you've got around that's camping stuff, it'd be a real good idea to have with you.
So, we're sort of tracking this monster, and a monster it is.
The feeder bands now, bearing in mind where it is, east-southeast by 125 miles of the Cape, the feeder bands are slamming into North Carolina with heavy rain.
Can you imagine the size of a hurricane that would do that?
It's down still east-southeast of the Cape, and yet slamming feeder bands into North Carolina.
That is one big mother-in-storm.
First time calling a line, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
All right.
Yes.
This is taking you back a while, but I'm trying to see if you can recall a guest you had on your show several years ago named David Horowitz.
It was several years ago, and I'm trying to locate either if I could get a copy of the tape or if you can recall the book that he wrote because I've searched lively.
I noticed that most of your guests have got computers or websites or that sort of thing.
Would it be possible for you to have a setup where you on the internet where you can have a split screen where you would be on one side and your guests would be on the other side so the best people at home when we were watching on the internet, we could watch play the same thing?
Let me explain to you on the air what that would take, though, and why we can't do it right now.
In order to have the streaming video that, for example, I have right now that you can see and hear, it requires a very special line to be installed by the phone company.
It's a frame rate, it's called a frame rate line.
And in this case, it goes straight from here to Dallas, where broadcast.com is, and delivers a very fast stream to broadcast.com.
And then, of course, I've got cameras and I've got lighting and all of that to contend with.
So trying to set that up for each and every guest that we would have on the program would be logistically, absolutely, completely, utterly impossible.
Now, if a guest had a camera already set up, trying to think about this.
I don't think that we could get streaming video, but we might be able to get the webcam that I've got so you would see a photograph of the guest if they already had a computer and the right program and a camera.
But even that is kind of difficult logistically, so I don't know.
In other words, people coming from the east out toward you.
unidentified
Yeah, they're not finding any place to go, so I don't know.
And I've heard a comparison that if you imagine Floyd as being a dime, or rather a half a dollar, and a dime as being Andrew, that sort of would give you a comparison of the storm size.
You know, looking at the map of the southeastern U.S., this hurricane is so large that it's literally like a piece of a puzzle headed up to fill that entire gap, the sort of U-shaped area or crescent-shaped area would be more like it, that forms from Florida up through North Carolina.
It will just fill that entire area when it gets there.