OUTDOORS COLUMN: Hurricane Fay Fades Away

We’ve been benefiting from the final hours of a deadly storm born in the Atlantic Ocean and christened Hurricane Fay. She was the sixth named storm of the 2008 hurricane season, and when she roared into the Caribbean she became a killer. Then she waltzed back and forth across Florida spreading more death and destruction and setting a record of four landfalls in that state.

Most of her destructive power was spent when she arrived in our area, and she only brought us much needed rain. Drought conditions have abated because of Fay. But we’re still behind in rainfall, and that does impact most of our mountain trout streams.

Most of them depend on surface water for the bulk of their flow. They originate at a small spring in high elevations and the water moving through surface soil, leaf litter, and rock strata near the surface augments them as they descend to the valleys below.

According to Brian Boyd, Senior Service Hydrologist in the Morristown Office of the National Weather Service, there is a pattern to the type of severe drought that we’ve been experiencing.

“In general, major droughts occur every twenty years or so,” Boyd said. “Believe it or not they’ve been associated with the sunspot cycle. There’s no cause and effect there but back in the Nineteen-teens,
Thirties, Fifties, Seventies, and then beginning in the Nineties we’ve seen a major drought cycle occur.

“What exactly that’s caused by I’m not sure anybody knows. There are some cycles in the atmosphere all the time, really long ones, really short ones. When you get down to a really short period of time the cycles are hard to see. If it was easy to spot a three-day cycle it would be really easy to forecast the weather and nobody would be paying us to do this.

“If we were to look at the long-term cycle, this twenty-year cycle we see going on started back in the late Nineties or around 2000. We should theoretically be getting out of the drought cycle, and we have sort of gotten into a wetter pattern in the last several months than we’ve had in the last year.”

Boyd said that before Fay wandered in, the region had been without significant rain for several weeks and the drought appeared to be worsening.

“My hope is that we are getting into a wetter pattern and we’ll see that for the next several months at least,” Boyd added. “That would help a lot.”

We would need to see several more, perhaps as many as four, former hurricanes and tropical storms coming into the area to really get us back to “normal.” Of course, they might not all be as mild as Fay. Some of the storms born in the Atlantic have arrived with much of their powers intact and delivered a significant amount of damage to our region.

I suppose we’re really caught between the big, dry devil and the deep blue sea. Maybe it’ll work out.

George Grant writes a weekly outdoors column for the Bristol Herald Courier. He can be reached at