Whether you love the excitement that surrounds them or hate thinking of the destruction they leave behind, hurricanes just come with the territory of working on the North Carolina coast.

And not everyone is complaining. Besides strong winds and heavy rains, the storms also bring in business for local companies. From long-term disaster preparedness planning to recovery efforts, area companies have found a market helping residents, businesses and government agencies cope with the storms.

“We aren’t happy when a hurricane comes because of the significant damage they can cause, but it is exciting,” said Mark Sudduth, who manages the website Hurricane Track.

After graduating from University of North Carolina Wilmington with a geography degree, Sudduth channeled his lifelong passion for hurricanes into a career. Sudduth developed Wilmington-based Hurricane Track, the brand through which he provides a hurricane blog, live video and data of storms, tracking maps and interactive online chat groups for subscribers.

At the core of Sudduth’s business is the ability to show an accurate picture of the storm at landfall and then provide a thorough analysis of the data – something he said was unique in the market.

“Our primary goal is to explain to people what will the impact be for them,” Sudduth said. “It comes down to when the hurricane makes landfall, what is it actually doing? We’re the only company in the world that goes out to this extent to show what it’s doing.”

To collect data for his clients, Sudduth places his remote data gathering devices to collect the “vitals” of the storms, such of wind speed and air pressure. To bring subscribers into the action, Sudduth sometimes chases the systems in a Chevy Tahoe retrofitted to track the storms.

Sudduth now tracks hurricanes along the East Coast for about 450 paid subscribers. Past and present clients include government officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, media companies such as CNN and coastal homeowners.

“Most clients are your average coastal homeowner,” Sudduth said. “And some people just love weather and want a window into the world of hurricanes. We’ve got clients in Ireland and one in Israel, several in the U.K.”

Sudduth first noticed the demand for his on-the-scene weather data while standing on the Wrightsville Beach bridge trying to measure wind speed during Hurricane Bertha in 1996. Surrounded by reporters from national and local news stations, Sudduth held his amateur weather station up to record the storm’s measurements for his personal use.

“Then all these reporters came running out like I was Moses getting ready to talk to God for the Ten Commandments. It was like, really? I’m just a weather geek. I just want to know the wind speed here, and this is the only way I know to do it. But to them you would have thought it was the most incredible idea in the history of weather,” Sudduth said. “So I thought, obviously there’s a need for data. A light bulb came on – if it’s that exciting to these people, the general public will eat it up.”

Sudduth’s most recent addition to his brand is an app called Hurricane Impact, bringing his tracking maps, weather measurements, live video storm feed and video blogs to mobile devices.

Other local companies have capitalized on the threat of hurricanes in the area by focusing on disaster preparedness long before a storm even forms.

With businesses’ increasing reliance on electronics, ensuring data is protected and retrievable is crucial to functioning after a disaster.

Robbie Garner, president of Atlantic Computer Solutions in Wilmington, works with individuals and companies to ensure their computer data is retrievable should a disaster occur.

Garner said data backups in general are a major part of his business, but continuity solutions to reduce the impact of a hurricane are especially important to the businesses in the area.

“Most of our clients are larger businesses. Some are very in tune with email and business applications, so being down a few hours would be detrimental since they do business across the country,” Garner said.

He said those looking to protect data have a variety of options ranging from external storage devices and cloud options to off-site servers. The benefit of working with a professional data recovery service is being able to match clients’ expectations with the most effective and affordable option, he said.

“A company really needs to understand what they need and find out what they’re going to expect when a disaster happens,” Garner said. “With the right systems in place, we can accommodate most any kind of disaster or outage. But again, you just have to think ahead and prepare.”

Even global companies have established themselves in the Wilmington disaster market. Michigan-based Belfor Property Restoration is the largest disaster recovery and restoration services company in the world, with five offices in North Carolina, including one in Wilmington.

William Simmons, a sales representative with the company, said Belfor’s size means it can pull resources from all over the world to reduce the impact of disasters.

“We’re the global leader in this work and we have the power, because of the amount of people and equipment we have, to handle any size of disaster,” he said.

Simmons said he would like New Hanover County and Wilmington city officials to consider Belfor’s “Red Alert” program, which entails developing a customized emergency response plan with government leaders. In addition to property restoration services, the company could provide larger-scale options, such as a 53-foot mobile command center that can generate its own electricity to power essential government operations.

“For example, the mobile command center has the mobile capabilities of running the city of Wilmington or any other city,” Simmons said.

Preparations, both big and small, might be the only thing residents and businesses can do during the final months of this hurricane season. 

But Sudduth said it’s only a matter of time before that preparation is rewarded when the next major storm arrives.

“We’re getting kind of long in the tooth now, as they say,” he said. “There’s a lot of people here without any hurricane experience at all, and that’s scary because they are going to be shocked.”