It's all fine and well to point out and criticize the sometimes over-hyper and dire news coverage of these storms or when the forecasters get it all wrong. But on the other hand, it wasn’t really all that long ago when people had little to no warning.
Of course the great Galveston Hurricane comes to mind - people were told that a hurricane would never hit Galveston because the curve of the Gulf Coast protected it and we all know what happened, but also the 1938 New England hurricane. I watched a documentary about the 1938 storm not long ago.
At the time, it was accepted that hurricanes coming that far north would either weaken over cold water or turn sharply out to sea well before hitting New England.
At the time there were no satellites or Doppler radar or hurricane hunter planes or computer modeling and often the only reports came from ships at sea, but there was often a delay in those reports and if the ships steered far enough away from the storm, reports were few if any.
28 year-old rookie Charles Pierce was standing in for two veteran meteorologists. Pierce was more of a new breed of scientific weather forecaster who analyzed high and low pressure fronts rather than relying on past history and often intuition and old fashioned gut instinct as his older peers did. He concluded that the storm would be squeezed between a high-pressure area located to the west and a high-pressure area to the east, and that it would be forced to ride up a trough of low pressure into New England. He was overruled by the veteran meteorologists and no hurricane warning was issued. Only a few hours later hurricane force winds started lashing the New England coast, and then the storm surge came. Over 600 people died. Over a dozen children and their bus driver died when their school bus got swept away trying to cross a narrow causeway when a big storm surge came. Of course now days, based on modern forecasts, people would get a warning and schools would have been closed, etc.
Of course a dire prediction of a storm when it doesn’t come to pass or isn’t as bad as foretasted can lull one into a false sense of security or piss one off when plans are changed.
My husband and I went on a golf vacation to Myrtle Beach the week of Christmas and New Year’s, I think it was 1999. Mid-week we saw dire forecasts of a major east coast blizzard – potentially the "storm of the century" hitting the day before our vacation was to end and through which we would be driving home from SC to Maryland. Long story short, the storm never materialized and back home, on the day the great blizzard was supposed to be happening, it was near 50 degrees and sunny. I was sorely pissed because leaving a day early meant not going to Charleston. I missed out on our day trip but if the forecast would have been correct and we didn't leave a day early, ahead of the storm, we might have end up stranded on I-95 somewhere between DC and Baltimore in a blizzard. Not my idea of a fun way to end a vacation.
Then on the other hand I remember the Blizzard of 1983 when the weather forecast was for a little light snow – a dusting to an inch. 28+ inches later with hurricane force winds, thunder snow, temps in the single digits, phone and power disruptions and being stuck at work for the next 36 hours, sleeping on a hard floor with nothing but my coat for a bed, crackers and potato chips from the snack machine to eat and missing my own surprise birthday party (well there wasn’t really a party per se but my then fiancée, future husband and out best friends who were stuck at their home had a party anyway and called me at work to let me know, when they could finally get a call out because the phone system was in chaos and jammed – they were going to attempt to rescue me but Ray’s 4-wheel drive got stuck at the end of his driveway). I remember as the snow kept falling and becoming heavier and heavier, the weather guy on WBAL radio kept changing the forecast – “one to two inchesâ€, then “3-4â€, then “4-6†and so and so on until when nearly 20 inches had fallen and the wind was causing major drifts , and I’ll never forget it, he said “we really don’t know how much snow we are going to get but it’s going to be a whole lotâ€. LOL!
But when they get it right they get it right. For instance, the Blizzard of January 2016. A predication of 30+ inches of snow was spot on. 32 inches fell where I lived and my Toyota Yaris was completely covered in snow, the only way to see my car was there was that the very top of the antenna was sticking up out of the snow drift. But for that storm, I was working an office job and took my laptop home, my boss insisted we not try to come to work if the roads were bad, so I could work as necessary and I stocked up on food and supplies a few days ahead of the storm, and it was a good thing I did because it took me 3 days after the storm finally ended to finally dig my car out. And despite the hype and people thinking it was all hype, the predictions on Superstorm Sandy, especially the storm surge for Lower Manhattan the surrounding areas was also very accurate.
My point is, I’d rather be warned and to prepare even if turns out to be a false alarm rather than to have no idea of what is possibly coming and not be at all prepared.
YMMV
