NOTE: The CASI PSI for Hurricane Fran concentrates on the Raliegh area, where the PSI took place. Obviously there was much more severe structural damage. For more information about the coastal destruction, see the WWW Links page.

The Hurricane Fran PSI involved going over three videotapes which included the LSI and more PSI's, all from the Raleigh area, home of the CASI HeadQuarters.

As video, photos, and the media showed, the damage was extensive.

Over the next six months, the location and direction of fallen trees in Wake County were observed and documented. This gave us the image below. The direction of the trees that had fallen in the county was predominantly West. This is not surprising considering that, with the counter-clockwise rotation of the Hurricane, the first damage would be from Easterly winds. It is interesting to note that this was also the "worst damage," the most trees down. This is either due to the fact that the strongest winds were in the Northern sector of the Hurricane, or, more likely, the trees that were apt to fall fell first.

If you click on the image above you will retrieve the full-size (1700x1300) 503KB JPG image in detail. The image was created in Adobe Photoshop 4.0. as a multi-layer PSD file then flattened and converted to JPG. The map is an official county detailed map.

The areas in green indicate areas in which the Investigation was performed. In 100% of these areas trees were down within 100 feet of any location. The areas in green had general coverage of various large and small trees fallen in a Westward direction. Most of the map was likely the same, but the Investigation did not reach to these areas. Each red arrow indicate swaths of 10 or more large trees, with their direction of fall indicated by the direction of the arrows. The length of the arrows is not significant. The asterisk (*) near the series of topmost arrows indicates the location of Headquarters. The asterisk below the bottom-most arrow indicates the location of the PSI from midnight to 3am.

The direction of the trees was determined by compass, not by direction from the road, which I found to be amazingly inaccurate plotting on a map. Unfortunately we could not get an aerial survey, and all of this was done via vehicle.

It is assumed that the red-arrowed areas are the result of some sort of downburst phenomena internal to the Hurricane.

The local newspaper, The Raleigh News and Observer, had some excellent graphics of the storm, which are scanned below (click for full-size versions). I have noted the location of CASI HQ on the map, and you have to admit that we couldn't have been in a better location for this one.

• CASI PSI Photos (Raleigh Area) NEW!
• Return to Hurricane Fran Page