Recovery and cleanup crews are doing everything they can following powerful hurricanes that slammed the Gulf Coast of Florida. Hurricane Helene made landfall more than three weeks ago, then moved into Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. Hurricane Milton then came ashore near Siesta Key last week as a strong category three, and pummeled areas that were still cleaning up from Helene. The death toll from both storms is in the hundreds, and dozens are still missing.
One man who covers these storms is Josh Morgerman, aka “Hurricane Man.” He lived in LA for a long time, then built a second home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to be closer to the action.
“If you're obsessed with violent weather, like I am, [LA] is a depressing place to live,” he tells KCRW. “I think that people move to LA because they're not into the weather. They just want it to be a non-factor in their lives. … However, because I chase hurricanes all over the world, and in other parts of the world, they're called different things, typhoons in East Asia, cyclones in Australia … LA despite being a vacuum of interesting weather is actually a great stepping-off point for me to chase this kind of weather all over the world.”
The first time Morgerman pursued a storm was during his college years. He recalls chasing it up the East Coast in a train. At the time, people weren’t using mobile phones or internet yet. So he had a paper map and a small bag with clothes.
“In my early chase career, it wasn't about documenting. It wasn't about shooting video. It was just about being in it. It was like a drug for me, just to be inside the hurricane, to feel it, to see it, to hear it,” he explains.
In the mid 2000s, he began shooting video and documenting the extreme weather.
“I'm the world's top hurricane chaser. I've been inside the inner cores of 78 hurricanes to date, which is more than anyone dead or alive. And even I still get scared in them. … It's that edge between fear and wonderment and fascination. It's like sweet and salty put together. It's that intense flavor, that's what you're hunting. So the fear is almost what makes the chase memorable. Because when you're inside a hurricane and it's scary, the force of it scares you, you feel like you're seeing God.”
However, he points out that his biggest joy has evolved into data collection. “I'm oftentimes hunting them down in very remote places. A lot of the times, the data I collect inside these things are the only data that exists from on the ground. So scientists use my data.”
“I'm the world's top hurricane chaser. I've been inside the inner cores of 78 hurricanes to date, which is more than anyone dead or alive. And even I still get scared in them,” says Josh Morgerman. Courtesy of ScreenDog Productions UKTV BBC.
Morgerman says one of his most memorable experiences was Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which made landfall in November 2013. He says it was the equivalent of a category five hurricane.
“I was in a city that completely went underwater at the height of the storm, because the bay just overflowed into the city. … I went from being a chaser to being a rescuer. My hotel went underwater. People were trapped on the first floor, and I just threw down my camera, jumped in the water, was pulling people out of their rooms, and getting them on mattresses to float them to the staircase,” he recalls. “And that that was a life-changing experience, also because of the aftermath, thousands and thousands of deaths within the city. So there were just dead bodies everywhere. And that was the first time I went through a storm where it went from being just this meteorologically fascinating thing to something that I just saw in a really, really graphic, up-close way, the human toll. And I was so rattled, I didn't want to chase for a while after that.”