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A Lawrence native and meteorologist considers himself lucky to be alive after surviving the power of Hurricane Charley as it hammered Port Charlotte, Fla.

Greg Zamarripa, a 1986 Lawrence High School graduate, was working Friday with a colleague videotaping the hurricane and testing a radar device when the Category 4 hurricane came ashore packing 145 mph winds with gusts up to 160 mph.

During the storm's peak, Zamarripa and storm chaser photographer Jim Reed were hiding under their car watching debris fly around them.

"I was absolutely horrified," Zamarripa said during a telephone interview Sunday. "I didn't think I was going to make it."

Zamarripa, who once worked for the Weather Channel, and Reed, who lives in Wichita, have chased and studied tornadoes and hurricanes, but nothing comes close to their experience with Charley, they said.

Zamarripa, who lives in Atlanta, and Reed drove to Florida when it appeared Charley was going to hit the Tampa area. They stayed in contact with Jon Davies, a private meteorologist in Wichita, who was tracking the hurricane's movements. When the hurricane turned south and east of Tampa, they drove to Port Charlotte, and found themselves facing the brunt of the storm.

Zamarripa and Reed were driving in a residential neighborhood when the storm began to build to full force. The wind speed picked up so fast they didn't have time to seek adequate shelter.

"We were watching roof shingles fly off," Zamarripa recalled. "Trash Dumpsters were blown over and were moving down the street. Tree branches were flying. The wind was so strong we couldn't turn right or left or it would have flipped the whole vehicle."

During a brief lull in the storm, Reed drove them to an abandoned house and parked in a carport. He and Zamarripa then took cover by lying on the ground against a wall as the wind picked up again and sent debris flying through the air.

Zamarripa knows the freight-train sound of a Kansas tornado, but he had never heard anything like the sound of Charley.

"This, seriously, was like a jet engine," he said. "It was hissing and screaming and the wind just would not stop."

Zamarripa and Reed crawled under the car as sheet metal from a shed blew into the carport. Glass, trees, and a large chunk of a concrete wall flew by.

"I was curled up under the car praying," Zamarripa said. "If we had left that carport we would have been shredded."

Reed, who met Zamarripa in 1992 while both were watching Hurricane George on the Mississippi gulf coast, also didn't think they were going to live through Charley.

"I apologized to him for getting him into this," Reed recalled saying to Zamarripa.

When the eye of the storm arrived, the two were able to crawl out and check their wounds. Although covered with bumps and scratches, they were not seriously injured. The winds dropped to 5 mph within a matter of minutes and the sun came out, Zamarripa said. They found an occupied house and a family there allowed them to come in moments before the backside of the storm hit. The storm continued for another hour before diminishing.

The videotape Reed and Zamarripa made of the hurricane has since been seen on CBS, ABC, CNN and Univision. They were interviewed by CBS and ABC. Sunday night they were interviewed on CNN. A Spanish interview with Zamarripa by Univision is pending.

Today Zamarripa begins a new job as science teacher at an Atlanta high school. He isn't sure when, or whether, he will try to track another hurricane.

"That one will be hard to top," he said of Charley. "I still get a little shaky when I think about it. When I see the video I get a little nauseous."

Zamarripa graduated from Kansas University in 1991 with a degree in atmospheric science. In 1998 he earned a master's in the subject. Zamarripa and Reed sometimes work for private entities collecting weather data, as they were last week.