My thoughts on Fay? When did people become such pussies? This isn’t Andrew, but people down here who have been through a hundred times worse are talking about hurricane supplies and hurricane shutters. This will be a Tropical Storm, or at worst, at worst right around the eyewall a Category One.
The adage that “You never can be too careful” is wrong. You certainly can be too careful and live your life in fear.
I’m not seeing fear. All I’m seeing is people going “oh, goody, we sure do need the rain!”
I’m in a weird way looking forward to it, since it’s our first storm since moving into the new house about 2 months ago. We had three hurricanes go right over us in 2004, when we were living in a mobile-home in Plant City (near Tampa, for non-Floridians). Now we have a “real” house - concrete block and stucco - in Mulberry, farther inland and on very high ground, in a certified no-flood zone. It’ll be interesting.
It’s a bit of an inconvenience, and we’ll bring in our yard stuff as a precaution, but other than filling up my gas tank today we’re set. I’m just not looking forward to the power outage…we lose power in my town if there’s a stiff wind, it seems sometimes.
I’ve lived here for eight years now. My first couple of hurricane seasons had me worried and making mad dashes for the grocery store to stock up for the essentials. Now it rarely makes me blink an eye.
GASP! You are one of the complacent ones! Go out right now and install hurricane shutters on your windows and buy a generator! Governor Crist will come scold you if you don’t!!!
Really, please do go out immediately and spend thousands on hurricane prep. It won’t do you a bit of good, but the State damn sure needs the money.
Love the Buffett shoutout, by the way.
Shit. I thought the OP would be demanding a truck with plywood and a generator be delivered to his house. He IS a taxpayer, you know.
This is a perfect example of where you live dictating what makes you look crazy to others. Me, I would be on edge if a hurricane was damn-near certain to hit. In my world, hurricanes only have one category: King Hell Killstorm. I’m gonna be singing arias with the sharks in Hell because a splinter from a telephone pole is going to eviscerate me stem to stern as I duck and cover. Don’t try to convince me otherwise. All Floridians are insane.
On the other hand, it’s going to hit -40 this winter. Or even if it doesn’t hit -40, by -20F all exposed skin is a solid mass of pain anyway. There’s also going to be periods of blowing snow severe enough I can’t see ten feet in front of my face. That means I’m going to be out here in conditions where it would certainly kill me to walk into town, it might kill me to drive into town, and it could easily do me permanent damage to walk to my closest neighbor’s house. The solution to that is to work things out so I don’t have to travel on icy roads until they aren’t really icy anymore or, failing that, to make sure everything basically works. More or less. No big deal. All Montanans are perfectly rational.
Isn’t that why Katrina was so devastating? I seem to remember people being interviewed saying, “We didn’t think it was going to be this bad?” And all of us in the desert were thinking, “WTF? It was a hurricane coming!”
I suppose one does get a bit complacent but when we are being told a hurricane is going to hit and all we get are a few squalls year after year you learn not to get all Chicken Little at the first sign of a hurricane.
And I thought Katrina was only bad because the levees broke. If they would have held, the storm, while being pretty bad, would not have been as devastating. Or have I been misinformed?
Hurricanes don’t usually go up Louisiana way; mostly, they come up the east coast, or go all the way west to Mexico. AFAIK, the Mississippi delta gets one hurricane a year at most, by which time they’re generally severely weakened anyway.
Being out here in the wang, of course, we usually bear the brunt of them- hurricanes (generally) lose strength while over land, so if a hurricane passes over, say, Cuba, the Caymans, the Keys, and then the Florida mainland, it will usually be sputtering by the time it gets across to the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the time they’ll dissipate at that point.
Katrina was weird in that it sort of bounced off Florida, went way back out to sea, and then turned directly north, so that it hit Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana without losing any of its… hurricaney goodness? Power.
ETA: back to thread- chalk me up as one of those yawning. Every year is supposed to be the worst hurricane season ever and every year we don’t even get the day off at work - Charley excepted, of course. I’ll probably get a full tank of gas since there might not be any for a day or two afterwards, but that’s about the limit of my preparation.
Oh, and a case of Mountain Dew.
When all y’all in Flarduh are done with Fay, kindly leave enough rain in it to give NE North Carliner a 4 or 5 inch soaking.
Thank you.
Get you own. We’ve got swamps to fill.
I blame the media. Especially local media.
They’re like vultures, “Oooh, a big storm is coming maybe we’ll get some really good footage that the big networks will pick up!”. So they talk about storms a lot, being prepared, reminding us of what other storms have done. When you are constantly bombarded by this stuff, some people will start to believe it, after all your beloved local weatherman would not steer you wrong. And other people just roll their eyes, maybe buys a jug of water or two and brings the lawn furniture in from the yard.
Most of the time the heavy duty preparation won’t be needed but really all it takes is one time, one direct hit. Living in Florida is a little like Russian Roulette, one of these times there could be a hurricane in the barrel aimed at your head. It might be a good idea to at least be a little prepared.
Well, that would certainly explain my hairstyle this morning.
The media is freaking out because of Katrina, plain and simple. It was the biggest natural disaster in the nation’s history – and it would have been a fairly major disaster even had the levees in NOLA held, it scoured the Mississippi Gulf Coast and inland – so they don’t dare be accused of not taking a hurricane seriously.
Good luck, Floridians… hope it’s just an exciting rain storm. 
The media is freaking out to sell commericals. I for one and so darn sick of every storm being elevated to breaking news status.
My concern is losing my electricity because I was stupid enough to shop this weekend. This storm is supposed to be a windy downpouring but they throwing up warnings like it is going to be another Charlie and none of us need to go through that again.
What WILL happen is people are going to become complacent when there really is something to worry about due to all the media for the smaller storms.
I might bring in the flower-pots. I’ve always got batteries, water and canned food. I just happened to have bought gas on Thursday. I’m good.
Bring on the rain!