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.