With the Category 5 storm a week from landfall, Lowcountry residents calmly and methodically went through their all-too-familiar checklist: Buy batteries and water and get some plywood.

But when the National Hurricane Center said Isabel was going north, the sigh of relief could have registered on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Charlestonians, for the most part, believed the forecast.

"We were selling a lot of water and batteries last Friday and Saturday, but everybody was pretty calm about it," said Bryan Raver, store manager at the Coleman Boulevard Piggly Wiggly in Mount Pleasant. "But we had quit selling water by Monday. It was about the middle of Sunday that everything changed."

That's about the time Charleston heard the good news: The forecast for Isabel showed the storm jogging north on a collision course for North Carolina and Virginia.

Lowcountry residents love those jogs to the north.

James Island resident Ervin Singleton said that no one in his subdivision boarded up their homes or took any extreme precautions as Isabel approached the East Coast. "I felt like the worst we might get was the edge of the wind," Singleton said. "I didn't think it was coming here. But then, I didn't think Hugo was coming, either."

Still, he said that after last weekend's forecast, he relaxed a little. And so did most everyone else.

"I think it's because the weather forecasts are getting better," Singleton said.

In fact, they are. For Isabel, as it turned out, the forecast was dead-on. It predicted landfall within 100 miles five days before it happened.

"It was a better than average tracking forecast," said Richard Knabb, a science and operations officer with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "It's not always going to be so close."

But it wasn't surprising that this storm, which eventually calmed down to a Category 2, tracked so close to the model.

The Hurricane Center relies on models generated from four separate supercomputers when predicting the path of hurricanes. One is run by the Navy; another comes from the United Kingdom. Two others come from the National Weather Services headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Usually, the official forecast is an average of what these four models say. The "consensus," it's called.

This time, all the models said pretty much the same thing.

Knabb said the models might have been helped in this case by strong steering currents in the atmosphere, a major factor in a storm's path. Isabel had weather systems to either side of it that were pretty much aiming her for the middle of North Carolina.

While there will always be some variables that can't be accounted for, in general, advances in computers and the ability to gather data from the leading edge of storms has increased the accuracy of predictions over the years. And that message seems to be seeping into Charleston's collective storm radar.

"I felt better after Sunday, but was worried about the people north of here," said downtown resident Aline Smith. "I have relatives in North Carolina and Maryland."

It would be hard to blame Lowcountry residents for being a tad jumpy this time of the year. Fourteen years ago this evening, a Category 4 monster named Hugo passed through Charleston Harbor, leaving death, destruction and a lifetime of nightmares in its wake.

A decade later, when Hurricane Floyd threatened, so many skittish people hit the road that Interstate 26 was jammed to Columbia for a full day. It seemed that Charleston, rightfully so, had a bad case of the jitters.

But for Isabel, which briefly exceeded Hugo in ferocity and followed its path in tracking models, most people just stayed put and took surprisingly few precautions.

At the Isle of Palms Marina, John Gilmore said that few people bothered to move their boats. He said maybe a dozen people secured their boats more than a week ago; but after Sunday, no one bothered to do more.

Mount Pleasant resident Bettye Cecil was watching the forecast from Charlotte, but didn't bother coming back until Wednesday to batten down the hatches. She wasn't too worried the storm was going to hit here.

"I'm careful. I don't wait until the last minute to get ready because I like to avoid the crowds," Cecil said. "But we weren't too worried."

This time, anyway.

Click here to return to story:
http://www.charleston.net/stories/092103/loc_21accuracy.shtml