Beware the BS Surge

I decided to check on “Hurricane” Matthew just now. It came ashore, which is a giant victory for the global warming people. A giant victory which can’t begin to offset eleven continuous years of total defeat. Still, congratulations.

Matt Drudge is being criticized for suggesting NOAA hypes storms intentionally, exaggerating the threat. Without going so far as to say Drudge is right (because I don’t have enough information to say that), let me point out some amusing facts.

1. The latest NHC assessment calls Matthew a Category 1 hurricane with 75-mph winds.

2. The current wind in Wilmington, North Carolina (where Matthew is now, according to The Weather Channel) is 6.3 mph. That’s 6.3, not 63. Now I’m watching some guy on the beach in Wilmington; the winds appear to be somewhere around 20 mph.

3. If there were any good scenes of destruction or violent wind to show, they would be all over the TV. They are not. That proves they don’t exist.

I want to be fair here, but 75 mph is just barely a hurricane. And if you can stand on the beach during the height of a storm, it’s no hurricane. It’s impossible to stand steadily in sustained hurricane-force winds.

The gulf between the hype and the facts has been enormous ever since Matthew left the Bahamas. I sat here and watched the updates, and I looked out the window to see what was actually happening. There was no relationship between the weather here and the hysterical predictions on the monitor. Nothing at all happened. Not only that; long after the storm had passed this county, I was seeing tropical storm warnings for my area.

A watch means bad weather may occur. A warning means it’s expected to occur. NOAA appears to have kept warnings up for my area long after it became impossible for them to be fulfilled. What’s the explanation for that? Sure, there was a 0.000001% chance the storm could stop instantly, reverse course, and move to the west. And when you flip a coin, it can fall so it stands on its edge. We could also have been struck by a giant meteor. You don’t post warnings for things that improbable.

The storm is dead. I assume they’ll keep the cone of doom on the maps as long as possible, but tiny, weak storms don’t come back to life after going ashore and losing their hurricane status.

The talking heads are hyping the rain now. They know the wind is feeble, so they’re working with what they have. They’re not quitters.

A lot of people have lost power in Florida and Georgia, but you don’t need a powerful storm to knock the power out. Power goes out in different ways. When Andrew hit, it took power out by snapping telephone poles in half and twisting concrete power poles off at their bases. Weak storms take power out by snapping a few wires here and there. Also, power companies shut grids down before damage occurs, so some of the outages are man-made. You can’t just look at the numbers and say a storm that puts a lot of people in the dark is a big deal. You have to look at the time it takes to restore power. Andrew left damage that took about two months to fix.

When Andrew left my area, no one had power. No one. Maybe some hospitals and other facilities with their own generators, but the grid was down and could not be restored. There were no traffic lights. There were no open businesses. If you wanted a hamburger, you had to go to the next county. In areas that were hit by Matthew, power outages are hit and miss.

The flooding is bad, but it’s limited to low-lying areas, and the water goes down when the storm passes. They’re claiming the surge will hit “up to” seven feet. If I had to bet? Four.

They’re saying the storm will be expensive. Sure it will; it hit a huge area. But it’s no Katrina. Light damage over a large area equals big money. The cost doesn’t indicate the type of extinction-level event a crazed Shepard Smith predicted on Fox News.

Whether Drudge is right or not, the threat was grossly exaggerated, and the exaggeration continued even after the storm passed areas to which the hype was being applied.

Some wimp is on Wrightsville Beach right now, moaning about 35-mph winds as if the world is ending. I would be embarrassed to be seen doing that.

When the news people jump on chairs and raise their skirts over nothing, it trains the public to ignore them. They don’t think about that. Some storms are extremely intense, and the public needs to react correctly. When the pundits void themselves over minor storms like Matthew, it assures that the next big hurricane will claim more victims than it should.

The moral of the story seems to be this: turn on the Internet, follow the storms, and use your common sense, because the pundits do not have any. They just want to sell potato chips and land network jobs.

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Things are getting truly ridiculous. Matthew is supposed to be moving at 13 mph, but somehow it’s also located over Wilmington, North Carolina, where it was hours ago. The maximum sustained wind speed is supposed to be 75 mph, but the current wind measurement in Wilmington is 12.3 mph, with gusts to 17.5.

Are they even trying any more?