the boy who cried wolf

My great concern with how Hurricane Ike has turned out for Victoria, specifically our employees is that it was a lot of hype and no payoff. I certainly didn't want mayhem and destruction to descend upon the city, peoples' homes, and the yard, but we essentially saw nothing from the hurricane and I can already tell that some people will not take the next threat as seriously. Despite generally well-intentioned efforts, the forecasting of weather is a task that has a high margin of error.

As natural disasters go, hurricanes are agonizingly slow. We've been staring at Ike for over two weeks, even before it had a name over at the National Hurricane Center. Once a storm actually gets a name, there are a bevy of other sites available to spew forth colorful graphics and models, but almost all the raw data comes from the NHC. I favor like Stormpulse and Weather Underground for fancy colored things. The NHC site does have satellite imagery that you can watch in a loop, though I wish it went back more than five hours. It still is a very interesting look at how a hurricane moves.

All this forecasting is great but there's just so much of it. And the disasterpiece that was Katrina has made people in this part of the country both acutely aware of the consequences of being ill-prepared and somehow over-confident in their own preparations. Some of that is due in part to the fact that many people in the Gulf Coast region who are not from New Orleans generally look down on people who are from New Orleans. It would be fair to say that a not insignificant portion of that disdain is racial in origin. You may live above sea level, but a storm surge will still flood your home if you live in low-lying areas, especially places near water.

As far as disasters go, earthquakes have a certain suddenness that defies prediction and even some preparation. As much a logistical nightmare it is to evacuate people for a monstrous hurricane, it's simply not possible to even hazard a guess as to when an earthquake will strike. Hurricanes however can change direction and in this instance, by the time they realized the severity of damage Houston would experience, officials knew it was more dangerous to evacuate several million people from the city than to have them ride our the storm. The only mandated evacuations came from the coastal counties that were certain to flood.