Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.29] on Thursday, December 11, 2014 at 16:43:26 :
In Reply to: Re: will this be the end? posted by jerryinidaho [24.49.176.137] on Thursday, December 11, 2014 at 15:31:56 :
...on the "weather alert" maps these days. Plus, they have alerts for all kinds of things that never even used to matter like fog or smoke, or "winter weather advisories" that just mean it might snow a little bit. And yes, the weather computers continually over-dramatize coming storms, and then back off when it gets closer to the time.
Of course on the flip side you have the majority of people grossly under-prepared to survive even a minor power outage. Watch the news coverage of any storm, and they'll always find some guy ranting that his cable's been out for 48 hours now, and some fat lady incensed that she hasn't been able to get to the grocery store for 3 days (like she couldn't survive a month on body fat alone, and like she doesn't even keep 3 days worth of food in her house).
And then they always find some government officials to worry about what might happen next -- the melting snow will cause flooding, the dead bodies will cause disease, the burned hillsides will slide, etc. Of course that doesn't usually happen either. Maybe it's all a game to get more federal "disaster" money.
I do wonder what people would do if even relatively normal "bad weather" actually hit, like in 1860-61 when it was 30 below in Yakima, the mercury froze everywhere north of Spokane, the Columbia river froze over, and almost all the livestock in the Columbia Basin died, or in 1910 when snowslides were coming down through big old-growth timber in the North Cascades, and then everything got so dry that 10 million acres burned in 3 hot days in August. Or take another earthquake like the one new Brewster in pioneer times that had gas flares escaping from the ground, or the one near St Louis that literally tossed houses up in the air, and diverted the Mississippi river. Nobody today has any idea what a real natural disaster looks like. These days, it's two days without cable TV, or a nasty commute on the freeway.
Follow Ups: