THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 20, 1996 TAG: 9607200223
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MANTEO LENGTH: 67 lines
More than 2,000 sizzling lightning strikes hammered northeastern North Carolina on Thursday night.
Some strikes blasted the sands of the Outer Banks. Some hit a house in Moyock, or a tree in Elizabeth City, or fried a Gatesville television lead-in just when the show was getting good.
A busy electronic sensor at Manteo Airport recorded each thunderbolt that lit the skies over the Albemarle. Then the sensor notified two young women in faraway Arizona that another Outer Banks lightning strike had occurred.
Lynne Shumaker and Cheryl Turner are lightning experts who work for Global Atmospherics Inc., a private Tucson, Ariz., firm that does meteorological research for the National Weather Service, the Dare County Emergency Management headquarters andfor many private clients.
Whenever and wherever lightning occurs in the United States, chances are that Shumaker or Turner know about it at nearly the same instant that some distant storm-coward is cringing before a soon-to-come explosion of thunder.
``Global Atmospherics has given us a lot of useful information with the Manteo lightning sensor,'' said Bonnie Terrizzi, a National Weather Service forecaster at the new U.S. weather installation at Newport, N.C., near Morehead City.
Shumaker and Turner had a busy time Thursday after a huge, slow-moving electrical storm pushed southeast out of Tidewater Virginia, creating a magnificent and often frightening seven-hour electrical display in North Carolina.
In the Nags Head area alone 1,927 lightning strikes were recorded from noon Thursday to noon Friday. Shumaker and Turner made sure they logged each one on their detailed charts.
Global Atmospherics also provides a FAX service for customers like Sandy Sanderson, Dare County's director of Emergency Management, who often receives detailed lighting printouts that often show thousands of accurately plotted strike locations, some only a few hundred feet apart.
Meanwhile, at the National Weather Service station in Raleigh, forecasters said ``Thursday's weather over northeastern North Carolina wasn't such a big deal even though it took a long time to arrive and a long time to go away.''
The Raleigh forecasters said a ``weak trough of low pressure'' didn't have enough energy to rapidly push though the warm and very humid air to the south. The systems moved slowly. ``
For tired North Carolina Power linemen working blasted transformers, that meant more time for lightning to hammer their high-power lines.
``Those thunderstorms were relentless,'' said John Hughes, North Carolina Power regional manager.
``At 10:45 p.m. Thursday approximately 7,500 of our customers were without power,'' he said.
Nearly 300 customers remained without power at 1:30 p.m. Friday, said Hughes. But he expected to have all service restored by 5 p.m. Friday.
Meanwhile, by Friday afternoon a similar, but smaller replay of humid, hot, almost stagnant warm air was pooling south of another cold front that was shoving south.
``Isolated thunderstorms will continue,'' said a National Weather Service forecast for Friday evening.
And out in Arizona, Shumaker and Turner prepared to record more lightning zaps in northeastern North Carolina than anybody else in the weather reporting business. ILLUSTRATION: DREW C. WILSON, The Virginian-Pilot
After an early Friday morning storm dumped heavy rain, traffic moves
carefully through a flooded stretch of N.C. 12 at Salvo. The storm
left a 3.5 mile stretch of the highway impassable. by CNB