Spying On Sandy

So, you may have heard that a hurricane is heading up the East Coast. Normally a Category-1 storm which will probably have been downgraded to a tropical depression by the time it reaches New England isn't a big deal. However, this particular storm's path has it arriving at the roughly same time as a big storm coming from the west which is bringing a cold front with it. If the timing is just wrong they will collide and, if reports are to be believed, combine to form a giant storm which will effectively end life in the Northeast corridor. As you can imagine, I'm not pleased about this development. I know hurricane season doesn't actually end for another couple of weeks, but I had hoped we'd be done with this by now. Since the news stations are as sick of covering the Presidential elections as the rest of us are of paying attention to them, they have been all too happy to turn the studio over to the weathermen, who are breaking out all their latest graphics and computer models. This is their time to shine and they are making the most of it. Unfortunately they can't actually tell us what is going to happen, but they want us to know we should take steps to be prepared for the worst.

These warnings have been echoed by several emergency service outlets and I even got a robo-call from the power company telling me that while they will do their best to make sure service doesn't get interrupted, I should probably learn to operate a generator just to be safe. [Sidebar: I appreciate all these pre-emergency calls, but when there was an earthquake last week I didn't get so much as an alert on my TV. It is not helping to put me at ease. All these pre-warnings are giving me this sneaking suspicion that these companies are hoping we take care of as much as possible because they are grossly unprepared to handle wide-spread problems.] These calls for preparedness have led to the normal rational responses of people buying every bottle of water, loaf of bread and can of tuna in every store while topping off their gas tanks because even when hurricanes don't do much damage they cause already-high gas prices to shoot even higher. (The gas station near me was insane this afternoon.) Everyone is doing their best to follow orders and get as ready as they can, but deep down they know it is out of their hands. Sometimes Mother Nature just wants to mess with us and when she does we are powerless to stop it.

It's that helplessness which really drives me crazy. You desperately want to be doing something to get yourself ready for the storm, but even when you do everything you can it still doesn't feel like enough. For example, with the cottage on the Cape - I feel like I should drive down on Sunday and do something to make sure it will make it through. But, since we closed it for the winter a couple of weeks ago the power is off, the water is off, the deck has literally been cleared and the windows all closed and securely locked. Hell, thanks to earlier threats of hurricanes I even have fairly recent pictures for insurance purposes. It's as ready as it's ever going to be. (It's not even the storm I'm worried about so much as the storm surge. Between that and moon tide the house could be underwater. This is what sucks about living so close to the ocean.) So, even though I have this strong feeling I should be doing something there isn't actually anything I can do - a trip down wouldn't accomplish much more than wasting gas. I'm just going to watch weather reports and hope it's still there when I go check on it next week. It's not a fun feeling.

This is one of those times I hate living in an age where we have so much information and yet still no idea what to do with it all. For example, because of the internet I can currently check literally hundreds of websites, all of which will tell me the same thing about where the center of the storm is currently located and then all give me different answers about where the storm will be 24 hours from now. Weathermen, who are rarely correct even though they have all the best information, are just guessing so what chance do the rest of us have at predicting what is going to happen? It's Friday and the storm isn't expected to reach this area until Sunday night. Do you know how much can change in 48 hours? Instead of giving us answers they just give us more time to worry. That is why I have no confidence in any of these predictions and why every now and again I wish we could go back to the days of only getting 24 hours worth of weather at one time. Sure, it would cause more hysteria in the stores when big storms were actually coming, but it'll even out those other times when we worry about a storm for three days and then it turns before it ever gets here. Knowledge doesn't always equal power, is all I'm saying.

Of course, we can always hold out hope this storm will take a dramatic turn out to sea and all we'll get is some big waves for the 10 people in Massachusetts who surf. If you recall Hurricane Irene from this time last year you probably remember that was much ado about nothing for this part of the state. That storm was supposed to destroy us and while the western part of Massachusetts was damaged, we never had the 15 feet of water which was threatened. On top of all that we should never forget that weathermen are, at their core, reporters. That means that while they want to get the facts right, their biggest goal is to rope in as many viewers as they can and since people pay closer attention when they think something bad is going to happen, it would be in their interest to hype the storm up as much as possible. I'm kind of hoping this latest "Franken-storm" is just a big conspiracy between the weathermen, grocery stores and hardware suppliers to get a little cut of people's early Christmas shopping money. I know I would much rather have a generator I never have to use versus a summer house which needs to be rebuilt.