It doesn't matter what information the public is given... there will always be someone who thinks they can ride out the worst of hurricanes (take my family 10 years ago for example). The NHC needs to focus more on hurricane education, more on the epic tragedy that these things cause if they want to get the message into the public’s thick skull. The day before Charley hit my neighbor Bryan recited a line now infamous amongst my family: (in regards to Charley)... "Ah, it will only be a little wind and rain." We cannot expect people to take proper precautions if they only consider these storms to be "just a little bit of wind and rain". The general public does not understand hurricanes, and they refuse to accept the fact that, to some degree, NHC forecasters don't either. I have talked to countless people absolutely bewildered as to why Charley didn’t hit Tampa. One even told me, “When the realtor sold us our house here they said this area doesn’t get hurricanes.” (!!) You can blame ignorance, you can blame over hyped media, but all of this would be solved if people merely realized the fact that if you live in coastal Florida, you will most likely see a hurricane before you die. People put so much emphasis on El Nino and active season probability but they always forget, all it takes is one. Look at 1992, a relatively calm year in the Atlantic; however a late first storm of the season changed my life, as well as thousands of lives in Homestead and Louisiana, forever. Look at the ancient inhabitants of Central America. They respected hurricanes to the point where they made deities out of them, and refused to build along the coast. They didn’t have tracking maps or GOES. I think that we are on a threshold of understanding –we are to the point where we can fairly accurately predict these things, however not without a large margin of error. Perhaps a day will come when we can pinpoint the exact location of landfall years in advance; however for now hurricanes are not a force to stand in the face and laugh at, and they are not given the respect they and the Forces behind them so rightfully deserve. Unfortunately, until this changes, we will continue to see people perish in these epic storms.
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cheers
Edited by Lysis (Thu Mar 31 2005 05:53 PM)
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