In terms of preparedness, Irene isn't overblown even if it is overblown. There is a rush to buy canned food, flashlights, batteries, etc. We preppers just might say, "What? Didn't they already have all that in their bug-in kit? I certainly do. Come to think of it, let me get on eBay and order the Swiss rocket stove. My Jetboil and my authentic German military Esbit could use a friend." Some non-prepping people need the stress of a big crisis to get them to prep up.

As for the the actual status of Irene, I'd like to see some informed critique of NOAA's scientific methodology before calling the hurricane "phony." Where did they fail? What was wrong with their measurements, and how did they arrive at the incorrect measurements? Was there some sort of checking system to verify the data? Until then, I wouldn't put stock in that stuff. We need to check the science (i.e., the facts) before speculating about politics.

Arney's observation about the amateurism of Weather Underground stations seems to me to be kind of important. Maybe the weather gurus among us could tell us where to get good information. (I myself have been relying on the National Weather Service. I hope that's good enough. I do think that when it comes to tornados, they tend to err on the side of caution. Better to hide in the bathroom than dead, I guess.)

As for the media, yeah, they need stuff to feed a 24-hour news cycle. That explains stupid stuff like "how hot is it" this past summer. Dude, I know what 105 degrees means, you don't have to show cooking a pizza on the sidewalk. And then eating it. That's disgusting.

I wish I could surf in that stormy water.

Da Bing

Hi everyone. Just thought I'd throw in a quick aftermath/lessons learned" from Irene. First, I live in Southern Central VA. Going by the previous few posts, I really don't care what the storm was called, it sucked. I just walked outside and my neighborhood is going to have a lot of cleanup to do. Standing on my front porch, I can see seven trees blocking roads. One car is under a tree. We lost power last night around 5PM. No one can say when it'll be back on. As far as I know, and from what the neighbors can tell me, no one in the neighborhood was hurt. That's the good news. Everything else can be repaired or replaced.
As far as lessons learned, I'm fairly new to "organized prepping." We've always had a little bit of stuff in the pantry just in case, but it got a lot deeper after my daughter was born.
I guess I had pretty much all of the advised stuff to have on hand,and then some. After we lost power, I popped a couple of chem lights and put in the bathroom, just enough to give a little girl her night light, and help the adults find the needed target. I haven't gone out to start up the generator yet, need to get some tree limbs out of the way of the shed.
Sorry if this rambled on too much, sleep wasn't the highest priority last night.
Thoughts and prayers go out to those north of us in the path of whatever Irene is being called now....whatever they call her, she was a mean B!^&*

Welcome, glad to hear that you are OK.
Reports here in the UK suggest that although the hurricane is less severe than initialy feared, it is clearly far from trivial with a number of lives lost and substantial damage.
Shows the importance of preps.

What is the general view of the wisdom or otherwise of the evacuation order for parts of NYC ?
It seems to me that for those on upper floors of solidly constructed buildings, that sheltering in place might have been suited.
Supplies for at least a week would seem advisable.

Everything that Sue said, plus a bit. New York is a much more vertical city than New Orleans was. There are a couple dozen LARGE cranes that aren't rated for much over 50mph wind that as of the last update I had were still not properly contained. And the main NYC EOC is undergroud and built in a flood likely area.

You don't under estimate a hurricane. Not when you have a couple million people on an island surrounded by a river who's watershed is getting 8+ inches of rain in under 24 hours

And I would seriously question any attempt to say "NOAA got it wrong"- honestly, I smell ideology, rather than reality in that blog posting. Finding data points that fit preconceived notions even when that data source admits that it is imperfect, and then discarding everything else...

Y'all think it's ok to cry wolf and say a hurricane is going to be a major one so that it will force people to prep but it's NOT ok. The long term consequences are devastating.

Here's a good example of what happens...

Hurricane Betsy 1965 - this was a major storm that hit South Florida. It was properly forecast and reported and it was a devastating storm.

Hurricane Dawn 1972
Tropical Storm Dottie 1976
Hurricane David 1979
Trop Storm Dennis 1981
Trop Storm Isidore 1984
Trop Storm Bob 1985
Hurricane Floyd 1987
Tropical Storm Ana 1991

All of the above were very minor storms that hit South Florida but were all completely overhyped by the media and by NOAA and all of them did minimal damage. Most of these were forecast by NOAA as being hurricanes in the making. Everyone expected major damage but it never came. People prepped but in reality they didn't need to prep to the extent they were told to.

So what do you get by crying wolf at every little storm for two decades?

Hurricane Andrew 1992

By the time Andrew came ashore in 1992, people had abandoned sound building practices. Code enforcement had lapsed. People associated a storm that was forecast as a hurricane with the actual tropical storm that they experienced so the mental connection between forecast and reality was skewed. In other words, lots of people experienced minor tropical storms, but were told what they just experienced was a CAT1 hurricane.

Authorities had cried wolf so many times for so long that people did not properly prepare for hurricanes anymore. The forecasts became a joke amongst my friends. In the days prior to Andrew's landfall, NOAA received a lot of criticism for constantly hyping storms and many believe they forecast Andrew as a CAT4 instead of CAT5 because of this. The population in large part did not heed the warnings and forecasts due to their prior experiences with forecasts being overblown.

The outcome was devastating. Massive property damage and a population that was totally unprepared for the storm, before during and after.

Overhyping storms is not a good thing. The good people of North Carolina and Virginia now believe they have experienced a CAT2 hurricane. They did not. They experienced a tropical storm. Their mental association of those two is now engrained in them and that is a bad thing. What happens next year, when a CAT1 is forecast to hit North Carolina? People will say to themselves "Oh, we went through a CAT2 last year and it wasn't bad at all". The consequences of that could be devastating.

You forgot to mention Katrina and the number of folks who had ridden out hurricanes all their lives and this one would be no different. Doh!!

Peeps either have a survival mindset or they don't. A survival mindset takes every storm as an opportunity to practice for the really bad one. Was I really worried about Dagny living in DC? Nope, not at all, she's one of us and I'm sure she had already filled the pantry, stocked up on drinking water and topped off her fuel tank. However, it doesn't hurt to remind.

A governor, mayor or weather forecaster needs to high-ball the calls because if they fall short and people die, it's on them. By calling the storm at its high-end estimate, they are covered.

Yes, there are politics involved.

You accuse the authorities (the gubmint, perhaps?) of deliberately lying about weather prediction. Again, I reiterate my request: provide some critical analysis of NOAA's data gathering and analysis. Maybe what you call "hyping" is simply part and parcel of an inexact science. In other words, no manipulation is involved even if mistakes in weather prediction were made. If you can show that the authorities ignore sound science produced by NOAA, that's another story.

If you can't, then you are just making a political post. You can be anti-government, Baathist, PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER., Nazi, hippy, I don't care. But we don't do politics here. I don't think you have any scientific data to back you up. I think you start with a ideologically determined position, and then you bend science to fit your politics. That is just another form of superstition.

Da Bing

OK, here's the critical analysis... NOAA should have downgraded the storm's rating to a tropical storm as it made landfall in North Carolina. People would then associate the damage they see around them with the correct rating.

Was that too political?

No, not too political, but also not correct. The storm was still off-shore and winds where NOAA was measuring them ( Hurricane Hunters) were still hurricane velocity. Therefore, it was still a hurricane.

I don't personally know anyone who was actually in the warned areas (as opposed to, say, Kentucky) who is seriously complaining about evacuations and the urgings to be prepared for the worst. Yeah, we mock some in the media who are most prone to hysteria.

I don't know anyone who doesn't know that hurricane predictions are best guesses. Informed guesses, but guesses nonetheless. It's on these guesses -- which have a significant margin of error days in advance -- that authorities have to base their decisions on evacuation and pre-positioning emergency assets.

If fewer people had been cautious, more people would be dead. I prefer they err on the side of caution.

Sue made the excellent point, not emphasized nearly enough, that the hurricane threat does not just hinge on wind speed (which is the sole determination of the category 1-5 designation). The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is an important measurement of a hurricane's threat, but it is hardly the only one. Government and media would be negligent to focus solely on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Irene was notable for its girth, affecting a massive area where there are many communities, big and small, with limited egress. It dumped a lot of rain, on areas where the ground was already saturated. In some areas it hit at high tide.

The media and government - local, state and federal - were also concerned that it had been so long since the east coast (especially NYC) had been in a hurricane's path that people would be dangerously complacent. So there was much discussion of storms of the past and just what those past flood levels could mean in today's greatly more developed communities.

Irene also is not over and the damage assessment is just beginning. So it remains to be seen just to what degree Irene's wrath meshed with the warnings by government and media.

Meanwhile, in my immediate neighborhood there are some trees and many limbs down. And that threat remains while the ground is saturated and wind gusts are still occurring. Friends outside the Beltway, especially east and southeast, are still without power.

A lot more people in this area now have flashlights, batteries, gennies and bottled water. This hurricane season is young and Irene won't soon be forgotten. I think that around here, at least, Irene would prompt people to take future hurricane threats even more seriously.



"Virginia emergency officials said the power outages in the state are the second-biggest in history, behind only the outages linked to Hurricane Isabel, which hit the region in 2003. Officials said that as of Sunday afternoon there were more than 1 million customers without power throughout Virginia."