Storm days
Fran at Cape Fear
Category 3 at our front door, Sep 5, 1996.
- Medium
- NOAA storm track, modeled wind, and a 1996 tide gauge record
- Length
- 35 s
- Collection
- Storm days, The Carolina coast
- Posted
- Nov 10, 2026
The story
Fran comes up from the Bahamas as a Category 3 and comes ashore at Cape Fear at 8:30 PM on Thursday, Sep 5, 1996, with 115 mph winds. It heads straight north, just west of Raleigh, and by 8 the next morning it is a tropical storm near the Virginia line.
Underneath is Wilmington's tide gauge: the real water level against the tide that was predicted. Overnight the river at Wilmington peaked around 4 AM at 7.0 feet, 2.8 feet above the tide.
What you're seeing
- The swirl is a model of the wind built from the storm's recorded top speed.
- No one measured how wide hurricane winds reached until 2004, so its size is an estimate.
- The dashed line in the chart is the predicted tide.
Data
Have an interesting day.