I don't have a whole lot to say this morning. The hurricane passed by us and we survived almost entirely unscathed. A tree branch put a door ding size dent in the door of my Escort, and I honestly wouldn't have known about that had we not seen the branch on it. Our neighborhood did quite well, and things are slowly returning to normalcy.
There's still a 1970's line for gas at the few stations that have fuel, and WalMart is still closed, but we do have a couple grocery stores open for business, so we can get the essentials, as we need.
In other news, one of the stations out here finally quit doing 24 hour hurricane coverage yesterday evening, and we got a chance to notice that life exists outside the Houston area.
I'm going to gripe for a minute here. Why is it necessary to air hurricane coverage continuously? Are periodic updates any less effective? How mcuh does it help anyone to have a field reporter standing on the beach in Galveston to report every 30 minutes that yes, there is water here, and yes, there is wind? And then the folks behind the desk make some really unnecessary comments: "It's a good thing we're up here," "I hope that bridge doesn't go out and leave you stranded on the island," etc. I understand the severity of the hurricane, and I appreciate the importance of getting the information out, but I don't think continuous coverage of people trying to fill time with hurricane-related information is the best approach. Perhaps it'd be better to keep it to periodic updates, or even do a 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off type thing. I have a hunch that one network did it so that they could capitalize on the comprehensiveness of their coverage, and then the other networks followed suit so they wouldn't be the ones left out. Those poor reporters, having to be chipper all day while freaking inside at the thought of their being stuck in a downtown building during what could have been much worse than we actually got.
I don't remember what it was like when Mt. St. Helens erupted, but I can imagine it was somewhat similar.
5 comments:
Have to agree with you Steve. I think the continual thing can instill fear into some, i don't find it a healthy appraoch at all.
Glad your all fine :)
I actually heard an MSNBC reporter say "if you stay you will drown in your attic. You will not survive this storm. The choice to evacuate is yours." I haven't seen press that yellow since those heathen spaniards blew up the USS Maine.
Well, fortunately, I don't have an attic, so I didn't have to worry about drowning.
Yellow Journalism... everyone's favorite. Let's not forget some of the better moments in the history of the news: The Gulf of Tonkin, Little Nayirah, Y2K, etc.
Michelle,
We're all doing quite well. My sentiments go out to the folks to our east who bore the brunt of the storm, and to the residents of New Orleans, who have suffered more than most Americans in recent memory.
We noticed during this hurricane that most of the major news stations enhance the radar image to make it more ominous. On all the stations, Rita looked like some giant, fiery ball heading for Texas, but on the newscaster-less channel that just shows radar and a computer voice giving weather updates, it was just a few curved bands of green with some yellow in the middle.
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