Weather

[altivo]

Everyone in the path of Irene, be careful, OK? We're thinking of you, even though we can't do a lot from here.

I'm not sure which is worse, our kind of disaster where at most one gets a few minutes of warning (tornado, thunderstorm) or things like hurricanes where you keep hearing about it for days before the time comes. I guess our winter storms are often like that, where the media starts in about three days in advance, telling us we're all going to die and it's going to be the worst storm ever in the history of the world. Usually that guarantees that the storm will be a dud. Maybe the same applies to hurricanes.

For some reason, this week has really done me in. I think I'll be going to bed early.

Comments

[hrrunka]

I guess getting a warning that turns out to be a mite over-the-top is possibly slightly better than the "there isn't a hurricane" one we got before the storm of '87...

[altivo]

That depends on how often they "overpredict" the risks. You have to consider the "boy-who-cried-wolf" consequences too.

So far this one appears to have been greatly exaggerated, but we're just at the beginning of landfall.

The Katrina disaster was so bad though that now we are going to see excessive overreaction in the other direction for quite some time. Certainly the evacuation of the Outer Banks was quite appropriate for Irene's path. I'm not so convinced about the dire warnings being thrown at New York City and New England. And those are the kind of things that lead people to ignore warnings in the future.