Posted by
Steve on Monday, August 29, 2011 3:44:10 PM
We are raising a nation of wimps. Hurricane Irene was not as big as advertised. That has been the case for about the last 10 years with hurricanes. But, ever since Katrina, the news media builds up hurricanes as if they will be worse than Katrina. Then, when it is far less than Katrina, they don’t say anything.
To hear the news media and the government, you would have thought that there was at least one category 5 hurricane coming, if not two. No, Irene was only a category 1 hurricane. A category 1 hurricane is still nothing to play around with, but it is nothing compared to a category 5. The damage it caused was extensive, but less than it could have been. Everybody made sure that nobody could accuse the news media or any level of government for not being ready this time. In the aftermath, we are left with the question as to why the frenzy?
When you add the overreaction to Irene with the overreaction to the moderate earthquake that hit Virginia, you wonder what is going on in Washington and New York. California and the west shrugs off earthquakes like the one that hit Virginia like they were almost nothing. The east acts as if they have never heard of an earthquake before. Florida shrugs off category one hurricanes as if they were nothing. Washington and New York get hysterical.
We need some leadership in Washington and various other locations that are willing to stand up and be counted. We cannot have a government that overreacts to every “potential disaster” that comes along. If they do that, when a real disaster is imminent, people will tend to disregard the warning. You can only overreact to things so many times before people figure out that you overreact to everything. Then, when a real disaster stares you in the face they will disregard your warning as nothing. You have to be careful how you deal with things like that. One time or even two, people will still believe you. But if the trend continues we will have a potential disaster on our hands that will dwarf Katrina by a large margin. People will disregard the warnings because of all these false alarms.
I realize that there was the potential that Irene could have grown in strength to a category 2 or even 3 storm; but what were the real odds of that? It was thought better to overreact to the potential so that there was no Katrina moment on everyone’s mind going into 2012. But, this is just another in a seeming long line of overreactions to potential disasters. Sooner or later people are going to stop believing the warnings and stay put. Then, when the real disaster hits the “experts” can say they warned us. That might be true, but they would have had this long series of overreactions leading up to the “correct” prediction.
For example, the hurricane experts predicted that the last three seasons would be worse than average for hurricanes. No hurricanes hit the United States during the last three years. With that kind of batting average, I did not believe the early predictions on Irene, either. We need experts that actually believe in science instead of this hoax called global warming. Global warming has clouded their ability to make accurate predictions over the past few years. Anyone with knowledge of real science would have made more accurate predictions than the so called “experts”.