Hurricane Hype A Valuable Reminder

Hurricane hype season is just a few days away. Get ready for six months of TV newscasts warning of a powerful storm, "coming up next." Eight commercials later, a weather forecaster will appear on our wide-screen TV with "news" that the latest hurricane is blowing itself out harmlessly up in the North Atlantic.
Would hope all tropical storms were that easy on our shorelines. Of course, we're still recovering from - and paying for - hurricanes like Charlie and Katrina. But the last two years have been easy on our hurricane emergency kits and have maybe lulled us into another false sense of storm security.
Except for those still reconstructing New Orleans or Punta Gorda, our hurricane memories are blessedly short. Or overly indulgent. All that hurricane hype may be one big turnoff, but it's a valuable reminder to take the season seriously.
Time to top off bottled water supplies, pick up a few extra days' worth of non-perishables at the supermarket, and lay in a fresh supply of radio and flashlight batteries.
Prepare to handle other basics, too, like carry cases to rescue often neglected household pets. Since we may lose electricity for a few days, even in heavy rain, keep your gas tank full and keep a little more cash on hand than usual.
Gas pumps can't work without electricity. Neither can ATMs or credit card processors. We tend to forget everyday details like these.
Clever inventors and marketers won't forget, either. There's always some new gadget coming on line, no matter how quiet recent hurricane seasons may have been. Among the newcomers: adhesive tarps to simplify temporary repairs, and a pumping device that may (or may not) keep your garage dry when flood waters threaten.
What we could use are more investments in hurricane-predicting innovations. It's not good enough to improve forecasts ever so slightly each year. We need to stretch accurate forecast time from a few days to a month, for example. If we can build a giant erector set in outer space, we should be able to forecast inclement weather better than we do now.
Despite all our preparations, we really don't have the vaguest idea how many hurricanes will strike in any given season, with what force or along which route. This point was driven home by none other than a Weather Channel hurricane "expert" in Hernando Today recently. "We just don't know," admitted the TV forecaster. Just so much hot air, in other words.
Don't blame recent intense hurricanes on man-made global warming, either. That convenient truth, often asserted by news media, doesn't wash. There were many more hurricanes in the first-half of the last century than between 1950 and 2005.
We can't be sure of a hurricane's path when it's almost right on top of us, even with the latest developments in TV weather radar. A timely example would be Charlie, which we all feared was dead-onto hit the Tampa Bay area four summers ago.
Literally at the last minute, Charlie changed course and struck land just south of us. Good for us, but devastating for suddenly homeless folks in Charlotte County. There are theories why, like water temperature changes and shifting winds, but who really cares? The damage was done. The forecaster's new toys couldn't help.
Some forecasters come up smelling like roses just by following the law of averages. It's safe to predict that a biggie will hit Cape Cod because it's long overdue. Another favorite prediction is that the coast of the Carolinas is vulnerable. Of course; it always is.
Tropical storms tend either to ravage somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico or to follow a more northerly course up the Atlantic Coast. And it doesn't take much skill to forecast that a major hurricane will make landfall somewhere in Florida within the next six months.
Looking back, we can draw one very certain conclusion: You can never be certain about hurricanes. It's hurricane season and we'd better be prepared for the worst, TV hype or not.