You know what, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If government doesn't do the warnings and all hell breaks loose, they catch flak. Then when they do warn and little to nothing happens, you have people screaming how you disrupted their lives. NOBODY can predict what nature will ulitimately do. If you choose to live an area that experiences these powerful storms, you damn well better be prepared to run for your life when the government tells you to get the hell out of there!
You missed the point completely. If I predict that every storm will be a disaster, then sooner or later I'll be right, but by the time a rare true disaster like the current one hits, people will have long since come to the conclusion that I'm full of $hit and stop paying attention to me.
Human nature - if someone is proven to be wrong and an alarmist time after time, then the one time that they're right, people are going to ignore them because they've been wrong so many times in the past.