The national disaster gets even worse

Water actually rose up from New York Harbor and splashed onto Battery Park! It has now receded, but there may be (steel yourself for this) worse to come!

- end of initial entry -

Ed H. writes:

I just walked out of my house here in Maryland. Puddles of water were everywhere. When I walked on my lawn it made this distinct sound that I can only describe as “squishy.” Ooops… the sun just popped out, how am I safely to interpret this? When will this nightmare of uncertainty end?

Robert B. writes:

My guess is, is that all of the hype and the ridiculous government preparations for this storm are to show how much smarter and, even more important, how much more “caring” the Democrats are about these things than the Republicans are. Of course now that the fierce storm has become merely a rainstorm, they will look thoroughly silly. I was in D.C. a few years ago and had to laugh when, on the day of my departure, the city and its media were all agog at the possibility of two inches of snow falling. Now granted, they have no snow plows, but two inches? For todays cars, that is nothing. It was nothing here in the ’60s and ’70s when no one had front wheel drive, let alone 4-wheel drive. In Denver, where they routinely get up to two feet in a single dump, they don’t bother to plow it—they just wait for the temperature to rise back up to 50 degrees and melt it off. What do people do while they wait a few days? They have parties with their neighbors and whatnot.

LA replies:

I’m not persuaded that the government preparation was wrong. But the 24/7 coverage on all TV stations was insane. Wouldn’t an occasional bulletin suffice? The idea that this storm had to become our total collective fixation for several days suggests that we are mentally disturbed as a society.

Roland D. writes:

Of course, the liberals wanted another Katrina, so that their guy could show us all how it’s supposed to be done.

JC in Houston writes:

Watching the online coverage of Irene it does make we wonder about all the news commentary of “disaster in the making genre.” Massive 50 mile per hour winds? I have to admit I’m a bit jaded though. Our area experienced Hurricane Ike in 2008, which came ashore as Category 2 hurricane. The worst part of it where I live was that the power was out for five days. Irene is of the same strength as the tropical storms we get every few years, lots of rain, some flooding and that’s about it.

James P. writes:

In Northern Virginia, the devastation was simply indescribable.

There were countless wet leaves all over the streets this morning!

Kristor writes:

I hope and pray that all the victims of this disaster are at least well-supplied with little plastic bottles of springwater throughout their terrible ordeal.

LA replies:

But are we going too far if we make fun of the whole thing? There are still major problems, according to the news. At about 7 p.m. this evening the TV reported that the storm was dropping huge amounts of rain on Vermont and causing extensive damage, bridges falling, and so on. But here was my reaction. Normally I would have felt a certain amount of concern about what was happening (or supposedly happening) in Vermont. But I felt so burned out and toxified by the 24/7 hyping of the phony national disaster that I didn’t have any commiseration left for the people of Vermont in their (supposedly) real problems. The media’s wildly excessive and unnatural “flood the zone” approach ends by distorting everything.

Kristor writes:

I have lived through flash flooding in the mountains of Vermont. My childhood vacation home—really a glorified shed—was almost washed down a brook that, 10 hours earlier, had been only 2.5 feet wide. This is absolutely not an exaggeration. I saw 100’ trees shooting down that brook as fast as a railroad train. Standing 250 feet up the side of the valley, where my father and I finally joined the rest of the family after snagging some supplies from the house in case we had to tent it, I could feel through the soles of my feet the impact of the boulders on the stream bed as they rolled. The water in the valley sounded like a freeway full of tanks zooming by at 60 mph. Looking back on it with the eye of a professional whitewater guide, I would estimate that Chase Brook was running about 8,000 cubic feet per second of water, up from a normal late summer flow (in a wet year) of about 50.

The whole valley was changed; every bridge washed out. My family was stranded in that valley for 3 days.

By which time, the town had rebuilt all the bridges. That’s how they rescued us; the men of the town rebuilt all the bridges in the township. The men went out with their chainsaws and a backhoe for each valley, and took care of it. When they finally got far enough up the valley to reach us, there we were, my father and I, chainsaws in hand and building a bridge (the brook was still running a bit too brisk to risk fording it). Thing is, we didn’t have a backhoe. It would have taken us a deal longer.

Vermonters can handle this. They’ve been handling tough weather for more than 200 years.

The storm that dropped all that water on us—I have never seen its equal—was almost certainly a hurricane. But, back then, no one paid attention to the word “hurricane.” Hurricanes happened to people in the tropics. In Vermont, the men would say: “Bit of rain.” “Eyah.” That was it.

We are absolutely right to make fun of these weenies in the media. They act like a bunch of scared little girls. Every time we laugh at them, we are effectually shouting, “The Emperor is naked!” I’ll mix metaphors by repeating my earlier message:

The media—and therefore the government—are in the business of crying wolf. It increases their revenues. When the real disaster comes and they are screaming their heads off, no one will pay attention.

When the real disaster comes, the weenies will run around helplessly shrieking, while the men get out their chainsaws and axes, and other weapons, and get to work.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 28, 2011 11:50 AM | Send