The thing is, the hurricane veterans around who have watched storms for years could tell this storm was not going to be brutal. Certainly the professionals should have been able to do that. Granted they don’t want to diminish the potential effects and be proven wrong, but the hyperbole being thrown around was incredible. I heard “catastrophic”, “historic”, “devastating”, etc....etc....etc.....
Go look at Google Images for some of the most devastating storms and you’ll see how different Irene looked.
She had no eye and was very disorganized. Often the eye will disintegrate and reform and that means the storm will emerge even stronger but Irene was way too close to landfall to do that.
If you look at some past tracks storms can take strange, meandering paths and they bear keeping an eye on but the hype on this storm was absolutely out of control and many of us (rightly) suspected it is as a point-counterpoint to Katrina so they could show how masterfully Zero handled this “crisis”.
Fair enough. It was pretty clear that she was struggling to reorganize, regardless of pressure.
I can’t speak for up north, but down here in NC, the thing that worried people about Irene wasn’t so much her sheer wind strength or lack thereof. It was storm surge on the coast—she was carrying the surge of a much stronger hurricane due to how big she was—and rain inland. Eastern NC was devastated by the back-to-back double whammy of Dennis and Floyd in 1999. Mercifully, Irene doesn’t look to be anywhere near that bad; it’s been very dry down east and the ground was able to soak up at least some of that 12”+ of rain. But there were still a million people without power and thousands upon thousands of trees taken down just in NC alone, with hundreds of thousands more in each state to the northeast up Irene’s path.
Oddly, Irene actually strengthened slightly and reformed the back (southern) side of her eyewall *after* she hit land. She seemed to get a final burst of energy from the marshlands on the inland side of the sounds separating the Outer Banks from the mainland before heading back out to see off Virginia Beach and heading up toward New Jersey.
I agree the hype was totally out of control on the storm, but some Freepers are being a little too cavalier about Irene. This was no summer thunderstorm, this storm has done a fair bit of damage on either end of her track (NC/VA, and New England) even if she spared much of the mid-Atlantic and NYC.
}:-)4