Hot Air

There's a special tropical disturbance statement out this afternoon for North Carolina. Several years ago, a storm like this, carrying strong thunderstorms but no circulation, would have passed with barely a comment, except from fishermen, but today, the Drudge Report is trumpeting the special announcement as a headline. Plus, there is a tropical wave 800 miles east of the southern Windward Islands (scary! scary!), but Drudge doesn't mention that the wave is disappearing, not gathering strength.

Whatever it takes to sell advertising, I guess. It's just as important not to overreact as to react too slowly.

For the most part, the Atlantic has been fairly quiet this season, so far....
Talking about underreaction, there is a new book out by Douglas Brinkley about Hurricane Katrina:

Well, it’s because you have widespread poverty in America, and there’s a real underclass to New Orleans, which the city boosters try to sweep under the rug. It’s a city teeming with poverty, and if the poor don’t have automobiles, it’s because they have a ticket or a traffic violation, and they haven’t paid it; or, the seniors are just too old to drive. Some people were caretakers -- a daughter who stayed because her mother was so sick that she couldn’t be moved. You had lonely people who were just stuck or waiting for their Social Security checks. They were supposed to get a check August 31, so on the 29th when the storm was coming, they didn’t want to leave town with no way out, no clear places to get buses, and with empty pockets. We make the assumption that we’re all watching the Weather Channel, we all have cable TV, and read newspapers, but there’s a whole segment of the population that just feel like “we don’t do hurricanes in New Orleans” so if they’ve lived there for 40 years and survived them all, then they’ll survive this one. They just weren’t prepared for the magnitude that occurred.