Irene has come and gone, and i am left with some thoughts and feelings about her visit, mostly, disappointment in our media, some elected officials and government regulated industries.
Sometime on Friday afternoon i tuned into CNN, you know, for the news; what i found is what, intellectually, i guess i should have expected to find - non stop coverage of the approaching Hurricane. What, in effect could have handled effectively on Headline New Network as a 2 minute story (this is the expected path of the Hurricane, these are potential effects of the Hurricane in your greater metropolitan area, take these precautions, tune into the Weather Channel or weather.com for more local details ) became useless and mind-numbing chatter for 50 minutes of every hour.
Libya's government had been overthrown, there remained a famine in Somalia, Greece and the United States were still not raising enough tax dollars to pay their bills...and all of the issues were complicated, with no resolutions on the horizon, yet CNN spent, in my unscientific study, about 80% of their coverage talking about a weather event. And CNN was not alone, CBS took the PGA coverage time slot for non-stop weather coverage.
Maybe spending that much time covering the Hurricane could have been justified, if the coverage did not seem to focus on the various networks jumping from correspondent to correspondent standing on a beach being asked what they saw, intermixed with video from supermarkets and home improvement stores showing people shopping. For example a how-to explaining that most of us had anywhere from 40 to 100 gallons of potable water in our water heaters might have prevented a run on plastic bottles; including the statistic that most flood deaths are people drowning in their cars might have prevented a run on gas stations; including a scientific element might have prevented taping Xs on windows was a useless exercise.
The news media was not alone - chief executives of municipalities couldn't seem to find enough microphones to speak into offering their storm preparation ideas. With all due respect to these find public servants, i am just not sure there expertise is in disaster planning. There was even one governor in the greater New Jersey area calling people idiots if they didn't follow his advice. There are those that loath the Federal Government, i am not one of them; but let us be be honest for one moment. If Irene had been as bad as predicted, everyone of these executives would have been looking to FEMA to get them dug out. We have emergency planning experts on payroll in Washington, why not just let them speak to us directly, in a uniform set of instructions...Washington was going to be asked to foot the rebuild bill anyway.
...and then Irene arrived in New Jersey, on her continuing path north. We all know the storm did not live up to the hype, and it seems, these storms never do. Given the uncertainty about predicting weather i am not going to spend any time critiquing the forecasting industry.
However, our government-regulated industries are another story, and are worth discussing. JCP&L provides electricity to Morristown, and its struggles in providing reliable service to our central business district have been discussed at length in other venues, but it's handling of the effects of Hurricane Irene were abysmal.
The area had an extremely wet August, and that fact was well reported by the media, and therefore common knowledge. This fact becomes important because JCP&L elected to build the local substation in the flood plain of the Whippany River and built their flood wall to 100 year flood specifications, which everyone knows occur significantly more of ten than every 100 years. So one has to ask, what specific precautions did they take prior to Irene's arrival?
At 7 AM on Sunday, 2 1/2 hours before the rain ended for the day, we lost power. Through updates received on Facebook from our two local reporters we were getting updates through our Mayor of the expected return of electricity. Caveat - words from a reporter of the Mayor's comments shouldn't necessarily be held against the utility; but i know our Mayor, and he has an engineering background, so i know he doesn't lie to the public and i know he is not baffled by engineers.
Anyway...starting Sunday afternoon the reports started that electric service was due back on by 11 PM Sunday night. Little by little, the reporters pushed the time back, again based on reports from our Mayor. One could fault the Mayor for his misstatements, but i have to assume he was not pulling the estimated times out of his posterior, and maybe he shouldn't have taken on the responsibility of informing Town residents, but the fact is there was a huge communication vacuum left by JCP&L...they were saying nothing, nothing. Starting Sunday afternoon, i received an email from PSE&G containing some generic restoration work information with a link for more specific information about every 8 hours; from JCP&L nothing until Monday afternoon, 20 hours after losing power. They delivered by way of a robocall, a commitment to restored electricity by 6 PM Monday evening. Power was finally restored at 12 noon on Tuesday.
Sometime on Friday afternoon i tuned into CNN, you know, for the news; what i found is what, intellectually, i guess i should have expected to find - non stop coverage of the approaching Hurricane. What, in effect could have handled effectively on Headline New Network as a 2 minute story (this is the expected path of the Hurricane, these are potential effects of the Hurricane in your greater metropolitan area, take these precautions, tune into the Weather Channel or weather.com for more local details ) became useless and mind-numbing chatter for 50 minutes of every hour.
Libya's government had been overthrown, there remained a famine in Somalia, Greece and the United States were still not raising enough tax dollars to pay their bills...and all of the issues were complicated, with no resolutions on the horizon, yet CNN spent, in my unscientific study, about 80% of their coverage talking about a weather event. And CNN was not alone, CBS took the PGA coverage time slot for non-stop weather coverage.
Maybe spending that much time covering the Hurricane could have been justified, if the coverage did not seem to focus on the various networks jumping from correspondent to correspondent standing on a beach being asked what they saw, intermixed with video from supermarkets and home improvement stores showing people shopping. For example a how-to explaining that most of us had anywhere from 40 to 100 gallons of potable water in our water heaters might have prevented a run on plastic bottles; including the statistic that most flood deaths are people drowning in their cars might have prevented a run on gas stations; including a scientific element might have prevented taping Xs on windows was a useless exercise.
The news media was not alone - chief executives of municipalities couldn't seem to find enough microphones to speak into offering their storm preparation ideas. With all due respect to these find public servants, i am just not sure there expertise is in disaster planning. There was even one governor in the greater New Jersey area calling people idiots if they didn't follow his advice. There are those that loath the Federal Government, i am not one of them; but let us be be honest for one moment. If Irene had been as bad as predicted, everyone of these executives would have been looking to FEMA to get them dug out. We have emergency planning experts on payroll in Washington, why not just let them speak to us directly, in a uniform set of instructions...Washington was going to be asked to foot the rebuild bill anyway.
...and then Irene arrived in New Jersey, on her continuing path north. We all know the storm did not live up to the hype, and it seems, these storms never do. Given the uncertainty about predicting weather i am not going to spend any time critiquing the forecasting industry.
However, our government-regulated industries are another story, and are worth discussing. JCP&L provides electricity to Morristown, and its struggles in providing reliable service to our central business district have been discussed at length in other venues, but it's handling of the effects of Hurricane Irene were abysmal.
The area had an extremely wet August, and that fact was well reported by the media, and therefore common knowledge. This fact becomes important because JCP&L elected to build the local substation in the flood plain of the Whippany River and built their flood wall to 100 year flood specifications, which everyone knows occur significantly more of ten than every 100 years. So one has to ask, what specific precautions did they take prior to Irene's arrival?
At 7 AM on Sunday, 2 1/2 hours before the rain ended for the day, we lost power. Through updates received on Facebook from our two local reporters we were getting updates through our Mayor of the expected return of electricity. Caveat - words from a reporter of the Mayor's comments shouldn't necessarily be held against the utility; but i know our Mayor, and he has an engineering background, so i know he doesn't lie to the public and i know he is not baffled by engineers.
Anyway...starting Sunday afternoon the reports started that electric service was due back on by 11 PM Sunday night. Little by little, the reporters pushed the time back, again based on reports from our Mayor. One could fault the Mayor for his misstatements, but i have to assume he was not pulling the estimated times out of his posterior, and maybe he shouldn't have taken on the responsibility of informing Town residents, but the fact is there was a huge communication vacuum left by JCP&L...they were saying nothing, nothing. Starting Sunday afternoon, i received an email from PSE&G containing some generic restoration work information with a link for more specific information about every 8 hours; from JCP&L nothing until Monday afternoon, 20 hours after losing power. They delivered by way of a robocall, a commitment to restored electricity by 6 PM Monday evening. Power was finally restored at 12 noon on Tuesday.
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