It was 22 years ago last week when Hurricane Fran wobbled ashore at Bald Head Island on a Thursday night and made a beeline for Raleigh, 130 miles inland. By the time the sun rose on Friday, parts of the capital were unrecognizable. Trees and power lines were down everywhere, the hum of generators were the only sounds to be heard, schools closed and were not able to reopen for more than a week.
In 1996, just under 250,000 people lived in Raleigh, and a little over a million lived in the Triangle. Double those numbers and you have today’s population - and now a storm that has all the potential to be even worse than Fran is threatening this area.