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 Virgini
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