There were times this week, even after the storm had struck, when it seemed that the threat to America's Gulf coast from Hurricane Katrina might have been exaggerated. The overhyping of American weather dramas is not, after all, an unknown phenomenon, on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet two days on it is clear that Katrina's destructive potential has been under-, not overstated.I was watching the news as the storm hit New Orleans and was convinced it wasn't all that bad. I'm not sure what had convinced me of that, but I'd guess it was a lot to do with past experience. How many times have we been wound up by over-excited 24 hours news channels and meteoroligists caught up in their own excitement?
That's what I'm wondering about today. Were so many people killed by the "crying wolf" phenomenon? From what I can gather more than 100,000 people didn't evacuate from New Orleans. I'm sure it was a similar reaction all along the gulf coast. Did those people figure it wasn't going to be as bad as the weathermen were talking about?
There have been big storms in the past, but the loss of life has never been that significant (Hurricane Andrew was responsible for 15 deaths, but I've read before that the number of people killed in traffic accidents and through homicides and suicides was zero and that the total death toll for the region was not much different than a normal day).
Even if I'm right about why so many chose not to evacuate, I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it. Asking television news presenters to be less sensationalist is like asking a dog not to bark. It's just not going to happen. And, I'm not sure you can prevent meteoroligists from getting excited about occasional phenomena like hurricanes. Besides, it's possible that they can't really distinguish between a storm that will damage a lot of property but kill very few and one like Katrina, which has killed hundreds and destroyed entire cities.
