Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Hurricane Fatigue?

First we get Richard Bradley at HuffPost, bemoaning CNN's 'Hurricane Addiction' as though Katrina was Yet Another Missing White Chick.

Now here's Atrios (ATRIOS!) complaining:

There are certainly a large number of people who currently have a genuine interest in finding out where and when Rita will hit, but nonetheless there's something a bit creepy about the number of people in this country who are truly obsessed with tracking the weather...
Okay, I don't know Bradley from Adam, but I really am a bit surprised at Atrios. I mean, lookit - Katrina has displaced upwards of a million Americans, and effected the lives of untold millions more, taking into account volunteers, relatives of displaced, the people in towns taking in the displaced, etc. Its effects on the economy are yet to be guestimated, and true costs probably won't be known for years.

Now we have another cat-5 hurricane bearing down on the part of the gulfcoast that Katrina missed. A double-whammy? how many more lives are going to be thrown into turmoil? What's going to happen to the gulf's oil-bearing capacity? Are we looking at the kickoff to a global depression?

This isn't a two-day story. If Rita does a Katrina on Texas... well, the possibilities are scary as shit. If the media wasn't obsessing over this, they'd be guilty of dereliction of duty. Just because they've been guilty for the past almost four years doesn't mean we ought to want them to ignore the important stories.

I mean, duh!

3 Comments:

At 12:57 AM, Blogger Gadfly said...

Good comment on Rita concerns. Dunno how Atrios can miss that point.

Latest word on the TV here in Dallas is that most likely landfall is just a touch west of Galveston/Houston, meaning the area gets slammed by the heaviest winds/rains, and a storm surge right up the Houston Ship Channel.

 
At 2:44 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think there is a huge middle ground between CNN's hyper-coverage of Hurricane Rita (in the aftermath of their hyper-coverage of Hurricane Katrina) and not caring about what happened to people on the Gulf Coast of Alabama/Mississippi/Louisiana in the last several weeks.

Speaking of the last several weeks, Katrina hit the US. Then what happened to Hurricanes "L", "M" and "N". I recall Ophelia and then missed out on Hurricane "P" and "Q". All of that squeezed into less than a month? Wow!

 
At 3:01 PM, Blogger Arachnae said...

Speaking of the last several weeks, Katrina hit the US. Then what happened to Hurricanes "L", "M" and "N". I recall Ophelia and then missed out on Hurricane "P" and "Q". All of that squeezed into less than a month? Wow!

There's five letters left this year (some letters aren't used because of the difficulty of finding names that start with them - once you've used Xavier and Quincy and so on, you're kind of out) so if there are more than five storms that reach 'naming-strength', they'll start on the greek alphabet - Hurricane Alpha , Beta, etc.

This is the first year ever they've had to worry about running out of letters.

 

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