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

Of all the hyped up news reports we heard yesterday, our favorite was CNN's Nancy Grace reporting on potential injuries caused by falling ham sandwiches:

NANCY GRACE: You know, there are a lot of fears with damage to buildings including a lot of our national monuments right now about injuries, crumbling. Even if something like a penny or a ham sandwich falls out of a building way high up, it can cause serious damage.

CNN Transcript

That quote pretty much made our day!

[quote=BigToe

NANCY GRACE: You know, there are a lot of fears with damage to buildings including a lot of our national monuments right now about injuries, crumbling. Even if something like a penny or a ham sandwich falls out of a building way high up, it can cause serious damage.

CNN Transcript

That quote pretty much made our day! [/quote]



LOL! Frightful then to imagine the carnage a Quarter Pounder With Cheese could cause to people who ran out of buildings.

In fairness to my DC friends in and out of the media -- this was an extremely unusual -- probably once in a lifetime -- (and therefore very interesting and newsworthy) experience for us.

Very few had any grounding in the geologic history of this area or the capacity for seismic waves to travel much further here than out west. Some of my DC pals rolled their eyes at NYC hogging the earthquake news because we're so much closer to the epicenter. But any significant shake in Manhattan would be concerning.

Millions of people in and around DC and New York had, for at least a few moments, the passing thought that this was a major terrorist attack. That is quite an adrenaline rush, especially for those of us with vivid memories of 9/11 who live and/or work near major terrorist targets.

It certainly is prompting many peops to revisit preparedness -- especially some of my friends who now have children and were scrambling yesterday to get hold of nannies and daycare providers.

The DC area probably has more reporters per sq. mile than any other area in the world. With a '100' year earthquake and the first hurricane to touch the east coast in 3 years, the hyperbole is going to be 1000x greater than had this happened in, oh say Colorado, where a 5.3 earthquake happened a couple hours earlier.

The more I hear about it, the funnier it's getting to be!

Isn't D.C. the place that is paralyzed by an inch of snow? Can you imagine the quake happening with an inch of snow on the ground? What a quandary to be in: can't leave, can't stay!

If a penny fell from 50 floors up, most of the people in the street would forget the quake and look up to see if there was more coming (in larger denominations).

And if someone dropped a ham sandwich from the same height, the pigeons and seagulls would have it LOOOOOOONG before it hit the ground.

But a well-filled water balloon at terminal velocity... now there's a weapon!

Sue

the photo of the tipped over plastic lawn chair has become the icon of the "non event"

My God, the ham sandwiches are falling!!! Flee, panic, run for the mustard.

Nancy Grace is about as smart as said ham sandwich. And Mythbusters long ago busted the penny myth/Empire State bldg/go right thru your head.

If this was the left coast, the quake would have been a non-event. As it is, many people are now seeing cracks in their driveways/foundations/walls that have been there for years; yet were caused by yestedays quake don't ya know.

The more I hear about network news, the more I don't watch it. CNN/HLN are not on my TV's list of stations to watch for a reason.

If "a ham sandwich falls out of a building way high up", one of DC's homeless would catch it before it hit the ground.

Yep. This pretty much sums it up.

I happened to have been home yesterday (had a new dishwasher delivered) and was watching the Fox New Channel through most of their reporting, and I have to say that at least in my view they didn't go overboard at all.

As might be expected, they were somewhat over-covering the Libian news of the compound being penetrated (OK, I suppose it was a pretty big thing) when all of a sudden they cut off commentary from someone near the compound and reported that there had been an earthquake. They said many buildings had evacuated, commented on how strange it looked to have so many people standing around, but pretty quickly they started emphasizing that it wasn't really a big deal, that the area didn't get many earthquakes so the buildings would need to be inspected before they'd likely let folks back in, and kept telling viewers that there really wasn't a need to be concerned - that they just needed to be patient. Oh, and it encouraged folks in the area to limit phone use to help keep communications open.

They did say that the commute back home would be tough for lots of folks since underground transportation areas and bridges were likely to be temporarily closed for inspctions. THAT would have certainly not been fun for mass transit commuters.

The only damage mentioned was the report of a leaning Washington Monument (but they said that was unconfirmed), they said their people saw ceiling tiles falling from some buildings, they showed a video of the top of a brick wall that had crumbled, and that was about it.

At some point they had a reporter standing in a grocery store near ground zero. Maybe half of the stuff on the shelves was now scattered across the store aisles. I would have guessed that lots of it was still saleable. They said arrangements had been made (hopefully) for local school kids to come help them pick up. I thought that was pretty cool.

Overall my sense was that Fox New Channel reporting was pretty level-headed.