Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Blog

A message from Irene for the get-a-lifers

By James M. Connolly

We’re spoiled. We think that by throwing a bunch of technology at a problem it not only will be fixed, but it will be flawless. Then, when the solution isn’t perfect, we gripe.

So, dope slaps go out to everyone who is complaining today that the weather forecasters said Hurricane Irene would be worse than it was. First, if, as the whiners are saying “it wasn’t that bad,” tell it to the poor folks in Northern New England who lost everything, or even the people in the 'burbs who won’t have power for a few more days. Keep in mind that more than 600,000 homes and businesses lost power, and almost 250,000 were still down this morning.

Are the critics actually disappointed that Irene wasn’t Katrina-esque?

If so, maybe technology has caused us to lose all perspective. Think back to Friday and Saturday when the computer models had Irene’s leading edge of rain and wind arriving Saturday night, and the full force hitting southern New England Sunday morning as a tropical storm or a Category 1 hurricane. Then it was expected to move up through Northern New England. It arrived probably a few miles away from what the models said, and as a tropical storm, did its thing across all of Southern New England, and headed up through New Hampshire and Vermont. It probably did about 95 percent of what was predicted.

If the weather forecasters tell me that there will be bright blue skies and 85 degree temps for a Labor Day cookout, and we end up with 48 hours of downpours, then I’m comfortable shouting that their mothers engaged in the world’s oldest profession. But I’m not going to complain that a killer storm wasn’t as bad as they said it could be. I grew up hearing the stories about the Hurricane of 1938 (which, ironically, took much the same route as Irene did). I’ll pass on another one of those, thank you.

Hundreds of people died in 1938 because nobody even knew there was a hurricane coming on what started off as a beautiful, late summer Sunday. Today, satellites begin tracking storms thousands of miles away as soon as they start appearing as tropical depressions. Media alerts go out. Buoys far out to sea measure the rise and fall of the ocean as surges pass, and brave air force personnel fly into the storm’s fury to measure everything except its shoe size. Then, hundreds of meteorologists map out a likely path and storm force, not always agreeing but giving us a heads-up.

If those predictions are off a bit, say the storm arrives a few hours earlier than expected, and is a bit stronger than expected, too bad. You knew for days that it was coming, and it was your responsibility as a grown adult to be ready for it. Even with the best of preparations, houses fall and people die. If, as has happened on more than one occasion in the past 20 years, a storm takes a right turn away from land and out to open ocean, I’m not going to wake up disappointed.

I’ll blame computers for replacing live humans in customer service centers. I’ll blame them when they crash (rarely these days) at inopportune times. I’ll even blame them for my poor spelling. But tell me a hurricane isn’t quite as bad as the computer thought it might be, and I’ll be perfectly happy to be just picking up a bunch of branches in the yard.