Wake me up when 320 tornadoes hit your state at once as happened in the south this year.
Hurricane hyperbole never goes out of style
Patrik Jonsson | The Christian Science Monitor | Aug 27, 2011
On one 24-hour news channel, a correspondent described the calm before hurricane Irene as the calm before a B-movie zombie attack. One anchor proclaimed the storm to be “as big as Europe.” Elsewhere, the hurricane was touted as the storm of a lifetime.
Storm hype is of course nothing new, neither is saying overwrought things when trying to fill up hours of airtime.
But as the hurricane approached, the fever pitch of the Irene coverage took on a life of its own, with government officials leading a chorus of caution even as closer watchers of the weather, especially on the ground in North Carolina, grew increasingly convinced that Irene would not strengthen, but steadily weaken instead into something closer to a massive tropical storm.
On one network, “they are desperately trying to [show] a nail, a shingle, anything. It’s getting embarrassing,” one Internet commenter said as Irene’s core made landfall with 74 mile-per-hour ground speed readings in many locations near its eye – right on the line between a tropical storm and a hurricane. Days earlier, forecasters believed a catastrophic Category 4 storm was a distinct possibility.
Read at:
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/hurricane-hyperbole-never-goes-out-style?page=full&print=yes