12:52 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 10, 2003

By Nancy Holland / 11 News

Camille is the one he remembers most. It was 1969. Camille is one of only two Category 5 hurricanes ever to hit the United States. When Dr. Neil Frank saw the storm approaching he would not have been surprised to see 10,000 casualties. It was, he says, “an awesome storm”.

In all his years at the National Hurricane Center and as one of the nation’s foremost hurricane experts he has tracked every storm and seen the aftermath of most of them. But his experience with storms didn’t start with hurricanes and it didn’t even start in the United States.

“My first experience was in a typhoon,” he says.

Dr. Frank was in the Air Force in Okinawa when the storm blew through. He would go on to experience two more typhoons, each one progressively worse, before returning to the United States. He brought back with him a lifelong passion for understanding and forecasting some of nature’s most incredible storms. For all of his desire to understand the science of it, it is the effect the great storms have on people that has lingered with him the longest.

“You’ve got to smell the smell and walk around and feel the emotion. Oh! It’s incredible,” he says.

Even Dr. Frank, who has spent so much time talking to people about the storms finds it difficult to adequately describe the true emotional aftermath.

In every major hurricane since 1974, he has gone to the coast, rented a car and driven the beaches.

“Sometimes, a lot of times they recognize you and, boy, they couldn’t ask enough questions," says Dr. Frank. "I’m going to tell you, there were times I was glad I wasn’t recognized 'cause people were mad and irate and just injured.”

The anger Dr. Frank says was not aimed at him directly, but it was impossible not to feel it and the pain.

“I remember Frederick. Frederick hit in ’79 in Alabama, Dauphin Island. I drove down. Of course you couldn’t get to Dauphin Island because the bridge was down. But Gulf Shores right across from Dauphin Island, I was there before they shut it and wouldn’t let anybody in.

"You couldn’t even drive to the west end of Gulf Shores because sand was all over the roads. So I was out walking up and down. I walked as far as I could. I remember one couple came down there. He’d been injured. He has his arm in a sling, had a bandage on his head. They were walking around just tears running down. They couldn’t find their house cause there were no landmarks. The streets were full of sand. The trees were gone. The houses were gone. You know it was like ‘it’s got to be around here’ you know I was listening to this conversation.”

He was glad at that moment they did not know that America’s foremost forecaster was listening in.

Something else always makes an impression on him. It is something television has no power to convey. It is the smell.

“You’ve got to smell the smell to really have the full impact of that. You have all these animals that are there. You’re got garbage all over that is deteriorating now, food lockers, iceboxes that are now not working. They open them up and the food is … it’s horrible.”

There are so many images of Miami after Andrew and its utter devastation. And an image he helped make famous of an apartment complex called the Richelieau. It blew away in Hurricane Camille. The people there had been having a hurricane party because they underestimated the power of the storm. All that remained was the foundation. Of the 25 people who tried to ride it out only a woman and a 10-year-old boy survived.

Dr. Frank has, over the years, often heard people say the same things. They are always surprised at how devastating a storm can be no matter how many times he and others have warned of the destruction. He remembers being a young forecaster in Miami in 1965. He decided it would be interesting to see what part of town flooded. In his off hours, he grabbed his maps and hit the streets. He turned down one street. On his left, a man was sitting outside in a lawn chair reading a book. On the right, he remembers he saw a woman come out of a house that had been flooded.

“I grabbed my maps and went running up there. 'I’m a researcher. ‘Ma’am I want to talk to you.’ She turned around and I mean tear streaks all up and down her face. She was bawling and crying ... she was mud from her head to her toes and stinking you know. It was horrible.

"I asked her, I wanted to see how high the water was. She looked at that guy across the street and said ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me?’ And I said 'Tell you what?’ She said 'Why didn’t somebody tell me that if I’d bought across the street I wouldn’t have been flooded.’”

That small conversation had a profound effect. He’s spent his life trying to warn people what may be coming. What people cannot prevent, they can prepare for. In those years, he personally has only been through two hurricanes.

It has now been 13 years since the Texas coast experienced a hurricane at all, almost 20 since the last major one, Hurricane Alicia. That is a record. It is a record Dr. Neil Frank would like to see increase. But some day, perhaps even this season, he knows, it will come to an end.

As the 2003 season begins, he will once again be trying to tell people what they can expect.