Maybe because like so many of the ‘experts’ on FR they decided that the storm was fake?
No doubt... I was really disappointed by some of the posts I’ve read on the threads over the last 24 hours. Don’t people get it? It’s not JUST RAIN - especially when you’ve got so many millions of people packed into such a small area. The risks associated with damage FROM the storm - like fire (as we’re seeing in Rockaway Beach), from downed power lines, collapsing buildings, etc... Sad that so many didn’t seem to listen to the warnings - makes the FDNY and other department’s jobs so much harder, too.
I could not believe those threads and some of those posters; they are pretty much silent now.
Hurricanes happen. In good presidencies and bad presidencies. To good people and bad people. Rain falls on the just and the guilty. Oh, and hurricane creation technology is out of the grasp of both pubbies and dummies.
Simple rule of thumb - in the face of a hurricane/tornado/wildfire etc, which unlike earthquakes can be mapped out in advance to some degree of accuracy, get out of town early. Even a 'hyped' hurricane can still mess up your year in a spectacular manner.
We're good here on FR, but we haven't got the entire internet captured to this site (yet), so of course a lot of folks were uninformed.
No, the National Hurricane Center did not do their jobs this week. I have three reasons why:
1. Extremely slow to embrace the better storm models. Their model of usual choice is the GFS weather model. There are known problems with it that came heavily into play here, and thus its output should have been discounted heavily last week.
2. Continued to report this storm as a Category 1 hurricane. Failed to highlight the significance of the storm size. Failed to highlight the storm surge issues with storm size + angle of approach. Failed to mention the significance of the extremely low pressure readings.
3. Whiffed completely on the acceleration of Sandy to the coast... which reduced "little time to prepare" to "no time to prepare". Especially considering that people tend to ignore news on a weekend.
Loss of life cannot be avoided here, but I would put a lot of these deaths on the NHC for doing a terrible job on Sandy. They MUST recognize the model problems and they MUST develop a different hurricane scaling system for reporting the danger that each storm poses.
Example: Andrew was a high 4/low Cat 5 storm - yet it impacted a VERY narrow area in south Florida... you could almost call it a huge tornado by comparison to Sandy. I was 200 miles up the coast and hardly had more than a stiff breeze out of it. On that scale, Sandy was a moderate Cat 1, but obviously was a lot worse overall.
I submit that a better measure of storm potential (and Joe Bastardi uses such a scale for his own forecasts, btw) would better alert the public... which is ultimately the NHC's job. [/rant]
I think it’s because people simply don’t trust the MSM to be honest, and assumed they were making political hay out of it - crying wolf, so to speak.