I'm reading this from the other side of the friggin country (the painfully blue state of Maine...GAH) and that just flat out scared me. It's like 'Well shit the instruments aren't built to withstand this so we'll just throw out an educated guess here...'
No, you're misreading that. The forecaster said that there were surface winds at the location where the 898mb reading was taken, leading him to believe that the lowest pressure in the hurricane was elsewhere. Nothing to do with an inability to measure the pressure level.