I've lived through a fair number of weather-emergencies...blizzards that saw the temperature drop and winds howl and snow pile up to 20 feet in drifts that buried a large metropolitan area...super-typhoons a couple hundred miles wide that have winds an hour's travel from the eye over 150mph. so, it
always amuses me when a storm is fixing to hit somewhere in the United States.
(more below the fold)
people in the media LOSE THEIR MINDS! catastrophic damage estimates, the possibility of a hundred-thousand dead....come on! "we're about to have a gazillion dollars in damage, and lake soul-train is going to flood all the way up the river to illinois, storm surge is predicted to be as high as the empire state building, cats and dogs are going to live together...."
i just saw the weather chick on CNN talk for 10-minutes straight, and i
swear she didn't take a SINGLE BREATH!
and, for some strange reason, people always re-build their wooden plywood houses with....more wooden, plywood houses! why is that? "it got totally annhilated last hurricane, and we live in the most hurricane-prone area of the country...so, let's use the taxpayer's money and build another house that is going to get crushed by the wind."
here on OKINAWA, we had no less than 10 typhoons last year. this is an ISLAND 15 miles wide, 60 or 70 miles long. everything is made of CONCRETE. we don't have mass evacuations, 'cuz there's really no place to go. we seem to get by just fine...the electricity might go out for a day or two, and life sucks...and we might have to boil water for a couple days. but we don't have catastrophic damage, and more than a million people live on this little island....rarely do any more than a handful of people die...and that's usually the dumb people that go out surfing or diving.
so, WTF, over?
