Some insightful commentary from my friend Jim Shepherd at The Outdoor Wire:

Shaken Up, Not Down

"There's been an earthquake in Virginia," my wife told me as soon as I answered my cellphone, "but Erica says it's no big deal at her house."

Five-plus hours later, that phrase summed up what I'd have to call multi-channel hysteria by the entire alphabet of all-news channels. In the time that passed I heard enough frantic scrambling for information to convince me that Orson Welles could once again do War of the Worlds and the news networks would be in their command bunkers, awaiting the Martian horde.

And the Weather Channel would be gleefully reporting on the possible environmental discord the death rays would have on the "upper atmospheric disturbance that has a minimal chance of growing into a tropical over the middle-Atlantic, but is the only possible 'hook' to the tragedy we can find."

As a former TV news guy, it was both amusing and disheartening. And not just because I think news standards have slipped, but because there is enough technology to report from any remote point on the globe, but Mineral, Virginia seemed absolutely unreachable. "It's as if Mineral has been decimated," one wide-eyed anchor reported.

The recipe for cataclysmic disaster -at least from their standpoint - is to have a near-event happen in or around New York and/or Washington, D.C. When officials follow standard safety procedures (evacuate buildings until things stabilize) and don't allow people back into public facilities while they're checked out, it's not near-media hysteria, it's a blind panic.

In rapid succession, I heard that ceiling tiles had fallen from Washington's Union Station ("directly across the street from our Fox News Bureau") and "a mall cop has told me that it appears the Washington Monument is leaning" (really, one "mall cop" and it's supplanted Italy's leaning tower?) along with several "iReporters tell us" and "looking at the social media" quotes that made it sound like the Martians were readying their death rays.

In fairness, when it became embarrassingly obvious that the earthquake was a non-event (at least while I'm writing - if the east coast slides into the Atlantic later tonight, I apologize), they went back to their news cycle.

Fortunately, there was other legitimate news - the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi's regime in Libya and the growing threat of Hurricane Irene - the first major hurricane of the season - to quickly allow the anchors and reporters to start making light of their earlier presumption of the worst.

As all this leads to a single point: in case of emergency, you need to be prepared to deal with your local situation and not pay a whole lot of attention to the things going on in areas removed from your immediate sphere of interest. When there's a chance of a hurricane making landfall around your home, stop watching the network newscasts and make certain you're prepared for a natural disaster.

As the quake forced the networks to admit they didn't have much of a gameplan for a widespread -and unexpected- natural catastrophe - it also made it plain that not many outside emergency responders had a clue as to what they might do or expect.

That's something that should concern each of us.

It should also have us reexamining our emergency preparedness plan.

You may have a plan that covers grabbing a "go bag" and heading for the hills, but does it presume you'll have cell service to coordinate with your family and friends? If there's not some old-fashioned pre-planning and advance coordination,you're setting the stage for a failure of your survival system.

Each should have re-learned something from yesterday's earthquake.

When anything happens today, everyone - and I mean virtually everyone- reaches for their cellphone to call, tweet or post to their social media account. They're obsessed with being in touch, but aren't really trying to communicate anything.

At that point, it's too-late to send a tweet that asks "Do we have medicine and water enough for six days?"

If Irene makes landfall anywhere along the east coast of the United States over the next five days and you're not prepared, well, you can't say you didn't have any advance warning. Yesterday's non-event should have given most of us a wakeup call to check and re-check our plans and our provisions.

One day, it won't be a joke.

--Jim Shepherd