This week's Ask A Met question comes from Morning Brief reader Eric, who asks, "What's the worst storm you've experienced?"

Meteorologist Caitlin Kaiser: So, this is gonna age me a little bit, but on the young side.

I was a senior in high school in 2018, and we actually had a hurricane day from school. I grew up north of Atlanta in the Suwanee, Georgia area, so we had snow days and things like that. But a hurricane day is not something that had ever happened before.

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The storm was Hurricane Michael, which had been a giant Category 5 storm when it made landfall in the Florida panhandle. But Michael kept on moving inland and wind gusts as high as 115 mph were recorded in Georgia.

So, I’m at home that morning because of the hurricane day at school, and the house I grew up in had a big forest behind it. We had a really steep driveway — one of those driveways people are terrified to back down — and the house sat on a flat area at the top. But the property continued to slope up behind the house and that’s where all of these old trees were leaning right over our house.

When it rained a lot, even on a normal day, water would be rushing and flooding down that hill. But the rain during Michael was worse than a normal day. There were these massive, I don't even know how old, towering trees. Oak trees, I think? And we could hear their branches scratching the tops of the roof.

It was late morning when the wind started to pick up. It got really dark, started to rain really hard, and my mom began watching the news. You know how the more you watch the news, the more it makes you nervous?

Well, my mom got so nervous that one of those trees was going to fall on our house that she made me sit next to the door to our basement. She said, “If you hear a crack, that means a tree is falling and you need to run down the stairs!”

So, I literally spent 12 hours sitting next to my basement door watching the local news on TV, listening to the branches creak and crack, waiting for a tree to fall on our house. And a tree did fall! Only, it fell sideways and didn’t hit the house.

When you’re 300 miles from the coast, you don’t expect to feel the remnants of a hurricane. But storms like Hurricane Helene last year showed how impactful hurricanes can be inland.

In a way, that might have been part of my origin story as a meteorologist. I was really scared of the weather as a kid. Tornadoes were my biggest fear. But I remember my senior year of high school thinking, “What am I gonna do with my life?”

And this hurricane really brought my interest in weather back to the forefront of my brain. I just spent all day listening to meteorologists, and I could see with my own two eyes what they were talking about on the news. That really connected the dots for me.

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