Kiss My Ass Irene

Have your fun, Gulf Coasters. Go ahead, LOL at us.

And Californians, please join in.

It is a national pastime, apparently, to whip out our rulers and measure our natural disasters against one another in an endless, cross-country, chest-thumping smackdown.

Yes, you’re totally right, America, about Washington’s wimpiness.

We nearly crashed Twitter last week when the 5.8-magnitude earthquake knocked the political biographies off our bookshelves and tipped over our patio chairs. The horror!

As Hurricane Irene churned toward the Mid-Atlantic, we bought enough dry goods to stock a humanitarian aid airlift for an entire continent and seriously discussed who could eat whom if it went all Donner party on us.

It became a game, trying to find D batteries. CVS, Wegmans, Safeway, Ace Hardware, Home Depot, Office Depot — all wiped out.

In one massive suburban grocery store Friday evening, it was impossible to find peanut butter or bread. So that’s what we plan to do if all heck breaks loose? PB&Js galore?

Of course, New Yorkers were a bit more clever and boozy about it, buying out all the ginger beer — the key ingredient in one of my favorite libations, a dark and stormy.

Bars whipped up hurricane drinks, foodies made insane frittatas and my kids wore their headlamps all night, asking: “Is the power out yet? Is the power out yet? When is the power going to go out, already?!”

Sorry, kids. Irene may be the most overhyped hurricane of our lifetime. Weather Web page hits and TV ratings went through the roof. In fact, that’s about all Irene did to roofs, at least in most places.

At dawn, we cleared away the branches and righted the garbage cans while the nation snickered.

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It was raining in Manhattan on Sunday morning, and the dogged correspondents in their brightly colored windbreakers were getting wet.

But the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm.

Not everyone was willing to accept this turn of events. When the Weather Channel’s Brian Norcross told MSNBC that forecasters had been expecting the first hurricane to make landfall in New York City since 1893—“and it didn’t happen”—anchor Alex Witt was openly skeptical.

“Really, Brian?” she asked. Hadn’t Irene technically still been a hurricane when it came ashore in New York an hour earlier? “Can’t we still go with that?”

No, Norcross said.

With not much to report on the island of Manhattan, the cable news channels switched to places like Long Beach, Long Island, where such correspondents as NBC’s Al Roker and CNN’s John King delivered their wind-whipped reports. “It looks pretty hurricane-ish to me,” Fox anchor Shep Smith said as reporter Jonathan Hunt, British and breathless, showed a hotel parking lot under a foot and a half of water.

Long Beach, it should be noted, is a narrow barrier island three feet above sea level and prone to flooding.



Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.

I say this with all due respect to the millions who were left without power, to those communities facing flooding problems, and of course to the families of the 11 people (at last count) who lost their lives in storm-related accidents.

And I take nothing away from the journalists who worked around the clock, many braving the elements, to cover a hurricane that was sweeping its way from North Carolina to New England.

But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised.

The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids. Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?

The symbiotic relationship between television and local officials played a huge role. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who was all over television on Sunday morning, had drawn saturation coverage with his blunt warnings to “get the hell off the beach.” New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who ordered evacuations of low-lying areas, has been a constant presence. President Obama and FEMA officials made sure to generate their share of news as well.
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As the storm weakened, a tone of reality crept into the live reports. After heading to Battery Park, on the low-lying southern tip of Manhattan, CNN’s Anderson Cooper said: “There has been some flooding—not a huge amount of flooding, and some of the water is already starting to recede … It’s actually not bad at all.”

But there is always the prospect that something bad might happen soon. “Is Wall Street going to open tomorrow?” business correspondent Bob Pisani asked on MSNBC, the towers of the financial district behind him.

Hurricanes are unpredictable, and it’s a great relief that the prophets of doom were wrong about Hurricane Irene. But don’t expect the cable networks to downgrade their coverage the next time a tropical storm gathers strength.

The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, defended the mass evacuation and the dramatic warnings.

"We were unwilling to risk the life of a single New Yorker. The bottom line is that I would make the same decisions again, without hesitation. We can't just, when a hurricane is coming, get out of the way and hope for the best," he said.

New York Transit Shutdown Costs City $1 Billion

New York’s subway and buses ground to a halt for two and a half days in December 2005 as a result of a worker strike.  The New York City comptroller’s office predicted the shutdown would cost the city as much as $1.6 billion in economic activity if service had been compromised for a full week.  As it was, the city lost approximately $400 million the first day and $300 million each of the next two days.  The loss was largely due to cancellations of economic activity and lost productivity as the city adjusted to alternative means of transportation.   

This economic impact was felt even though the city expected the strike and put contingency plans into effect.  New Yorkers carpooled, took taxis and used the commuter rails to get to work.  Thousands of New Yorkers also walked to their destinations.  

Yeah you win, but everyone still thinks you're an idiot.
How does that work?

This morning, as you know, Hurricane Irene hit New York City. The good news is the worst is over, and we will soon move to restore and return mode. The tides were heading towards low tide, and as you all know the backside of a low pressure area comes up the east coast where winds will force the waters away from the coast, so the dangers of additional flooding have been eliminated, and the existing flooding should start to go down.
"We do not yet know the full extent of the damaged caused by the Category 1 storm, but so far, as I said earlier, there is no confirmation of deaths or injuries from the storm. We are really very grateful for that. We are seeing some very serious consequences of the storm, including flooding, downed trees, and power outages.

I suspect that Izzy's definition of "idiot"
is everyone who does not agree with HIM.

Cooper asked CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers what had become of the dire forecasts that envisioned gleaming office buildings swaying as flood waters spilled into lower Manhattan.
Myers said that when Hurricane Irene smashed into the Outer Banks of North Carolina, that contact weakened the storm.
"It literally knocked the stuffing out of the eye," Myers said. "It never got its mojo back."
Meteorologists measured pressure levels inside the storm that could have allowed it to strengthen back into a Category 3 hurricane, Myers said, but Irene's romp over land in North Carolina prevented the eye wall from spinning into a more destructive storm by the time it arrived in New York.
"It never had that opportunity because North Carolina got in the way, dry air came across over Virginia and Maryland and got in the way, and although this was very low pressure, the reason why we could never let the guard down for New York City ... was because the pressure was low enough that at any time, if this storm decided to get its act together, it could have gone from a 60-70-80 miles per hour storm -- it easily could have been a 110 (miles per hour) storm like it was in the Caribbean and like it was in the Bahamas."

On Friday nite, my estimate of the situation
was similar to yours. I deemed it odd,
that I found no one on TV expressing that vu point.

On Friday nite, my estimate of the situation
was similar to yours. I deemed it odd,
that I found no one on TV expressing that vu point.

Deja vu ...do you remember back to the days
when the media was selling us on an invasion of Iraq???

The learning curve of America is painfully slow...

Deja vu ...do you remember back to the days when the media was selling us on an invasion of Iraq???

Once again we see that American journalism is on its death bed, totally unable to do its job when the corporate and political classes interests run counter to the truth.

What do you think the government should have done differently at the time a hurricane was actually anticipated

At that point. If so, what specifcally, do you think that different tack should have been?

So if you could just explain, in your own words, what exactly your beef is/was with the actions the authorities took, that would be a bit of a mercy.

You are seriously saying that there's some sort of similarity between the media's (dis)information about the Iraq invasion & media information regarding Hurricane Irene? If so, what sort of similarities, in your opinion

what sort of ulterior motive could the authorities in NYC have had, in calling for evacuation, when they believed a hurricane was heading for the city? Apart from the safety of residents & saving lives

They don't want to talk about it, so I will: Natural disasters can be good for politicians. For every New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who melts down under the pressure of dealing with Hurricane Katrina, there is a Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who stays frosty and works his White House connections to get more and more federal aid. There's an Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, who goes from being locked in a primary with Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore to basking in credit and sympathy and making his opponent totally irrelevent.

How does this work? If the governor or mayor or whoever in charge of disaster response is not incompetent, he gets to become the most visible figure in the state/city until the crisis is over. He gives commands. He shows up, khaki-clad, to disaster centers. He's the voice of authority. Just as importantly, there's no other news about his political opponents. In 2004, George W. Bush surged in Florida polls because the state was battered by four hurricanes that made Jeb Bush into a temporary warrior-king with a 2-1 approval/disapproval rating.
There aren't many elections happening on the east coast soon, but here's who stands to win if he doesn't completely screw up this weekend, in descending order of helpfulness.

The last 48 hours were blown, everyone continued to talk and prepare as if they were facing a possible cat 3 hurricane, when what they had was a cat 1 which was going to degenerate. New Jersey was right to do some of its evacuations, but few of New Yorks were.

What do you think the government should have done differently at the time a hurricane was actually anticipated?

The evacuations as mentioned should not have been called ...

..... because by the time they happened most of them were already known to be needless, and the shutting down of all transit of New York should have never happened,it was a senseless collapse of the will to fight the storm, unless it was all about money in which case we were lied to, because the claimed reason was all about saving lives and making getting the system back up to full speed faster.

Beyond those mentioned the politicians From Obama on down in front of the camera's constantly playing up the alleged dangers of the storm to obscene levels..was wrong. The disaster relief agencies claiming that the politicians were surely right, was wrong. The weather people not raising their voices to object to the hysteria when they knew that their worse case projections were not in fact of the "never before seen" variety that the fear mongers were selling. or New York their top wind projection was 70 mph gust, their storm surge projection was well below the protections of manhatten, and their rain projection was for at most 8 inches it two day-. These were substantially off on the high side (Central park had gusts 40mph, rain 6.5 inch and the storm surge was not 5 foot but 3.5 foot )

You are seriously saying that there's some sort of similarity between the media's (dis)information about the Iraq invasion & media information regarding Hurricane Irene? If so, what sort of similarities, in your opinion

The point David, is that having lived that experience only ten years ago our bull **** detectors should have screaming by Friday night...hearing all of this fear mongering with no one making any effort to fact check or give voice to any alternate view should have made everones hair stand up as it did mine and yours. Once again as it did with selling a disastrous military adventure the desires of corporate media and the politicians matched perfectly, but the truth lost. Once again we see that American journalism is on its death bed, totally unable to do its job when the corporate and political classes interests run counter to the truth.

You will see in Howard Kurtz's piece deep pessimism of ever getting healthy journalism back, at this point it is one of the great lost causes.