Today, we can happily report that — following the trials and tribulations of last month’s bullseye hurricane confrontation on our Wilmington, N.C. campus — we here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) are back in action. In fact, just a week after our return from evacuating, everything was cleaned up and looking like Hurricane Florence had never visited our 17-acre outdoor education campus.

But no matter how experienced you might be at preparing for, evacuating from, and recovering after a natural disaster, you can never fully anticipate what Mother Nature might toss your way as part of her standard repertoire of weather. And while today, with on-campus and field courses back in action, it certainly didn’t look that way on the morning of Friday, Sept. 28, when a thunderstorm completely unrelated to Hurricane Florence rumbled over our property.

That’s when a massive bolt of lightning hit the window of our director of operations’ office, sending a bolt of energy through her keyboard to her fingertips while she was working. A second bolt of lightning hit a tree adjacent to our gear shed, traveled down the tree, through its roots, blowing a hole through our property’s water line and sewer line, and cooking the conduit that houses our property’s power line.

The central panel for our

Say what you will about global warming, climate change and other hemispheric anomalies, but there’s no question in anybody’s mind that a Category 4 hurricane is making a direct bullseye run at Wilmington, N.C., and The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) headquarters facilities.

The good news is that our staff have all become bona fide experts in matters related to risk management. Our co-founders Zac and Celine Adair — along with the rest of our hometown administrative team — are hard at work preparing our coastal headquarters for a direct hit from this latest storm which you can track online through the National Hurricane Center.

Here on our campus, NCOAE staff has spent the last 36 hours preparing for the worst possible outcome — a direct hit. Buildings have been boarded up, all outdoor furniture and materials capable of being turned into life-threatening projectiles have been removed from the property, which ‘as the crow flies’ is located just a mile from the Carolina coastline.

NCOAE vans have been packed up with a