|
Edited on Wed Aug-31-05 09:44 AM by Atman
I'm almost originally from Florida. I grew up on the Atlantic coast, Cocoa Beach. During my sixteen years on that tiny barrier island, separated from the mainland by the Intracoastal Waterway, another island, and two large humpback bridges contecting the town to the mainland, I rode out every storm we had until, I think, David (I might have the name of the storm wrong). Most people rode out the severe storms, because they NEVER seemed as bad as the weathermen claimed they'd be. Never. But, when David came along, they were saying, really, seriously, this could be really bad! So, looking across all that open water on either side of me, with no way to the mainland when the two-foot-above-sea-level causeways flooded, I decided there simply wasn't any reason to chance it. When I came home after the evac, a tree had fallen on the side of my house, right on the electric panel, ripping it from the wall. My bathroom window was knocked out and the bathroom filled with a foot of mud and debris. And I had a wicked hangover from the hurricane parties.
But still, knowing how bad this storm was, why didn't everybody leave? Hmmm. Then I look at all the people being interviewed on CNN...they all seem to be poor as dirt. I've yet to see a family in their Humvee saying "Well, we had the Sub-Zero on a backup generator to keep the brie fresh, but we feared for our wine collection, so we chose to stay." Nope. I get the feeling that a LOT of these people really had no choice but to ride it out. We find it easy to say "Hey, they shoulda got in their cars and left!" But we aren't in their shoes.
A lot has to do with "the Ivan Effect," to be sure. Storms never seem to happen the way we're told they're going to, be they monster blizzards in the NE or hurricanes in the south. Perhaps modern weather predicting technology has made us think we have some more control over nature or something. But in reality, it only seems to make matters worse, as meteorologists and weather-readers use that Super Doppler as props, and they've made us think they're infallible. Except they're always wrong.
Except when they're right.
Maybe from here on in, weathermen should stick to predictions, and let people know that "WE JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS WILL DO, DESPITE THE PRETTY PICTURES!" Stop pretending you're so certain, as this storm didn't even track as you predicted. Just go back to the good old days -- I knew enough to evacuate Cocoa Beach way back in '78, without "street level Doppler," just based upon common sense. Bring some common sense back into weather reporting, and stop pretending Doppler radar gives you a hotline to Mother Nature. Admit you know nothing, and THAT is the reason to evacuate...not because you know everything. That just sets up the Ivan Effect when you're (inevitably) wrong.
|