A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

Well blow me down

The 2006 hurricane season kicks off today. We Gulf Coast denizens are especially skittish this year, for reasons that are obvious and don't require further elaboration. Nobody likes to think about having to hit the evacuation routes again, yet we'll all find ourselves watching the tropical updates for the next six months with a sick mixture of revulsion and anticipation, just the same.

This is also the time of year I trot out my "hurricane porn" entry. Not because I'm especially proud of it (though it is near the top of my rankings for most searched for posts), but because even in the wake of Katrina I feel it's pretty accurate. Moreso, actually.

I'm also not one to deny myself a cheap spike in traffic.

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Tropical storms and hurricanes are a big deal in the paved swamp I call home, i.e. Houston, TX. If you don't believe me, check out some of these images from when tropical storm Allison breezed through our humble town a couple years ago. It demonstrated both the awesome destructive power of nature and the necessity of having a cooler for the beer you were planning on drinking during the basketball game until the electricity went out.

Our family was lucky, in that neither our home nor our cars flooded. And once the power finally came back on, we discovered that all local programming (we didn't have cable) was fixed on the admittedly impressive images of the aftermath of the storm...for roughly the next three months.

This kind of coverage was understandable with regard to a titanic bastard of a storm like Allison, but it was only the latest in the local networks' long-standing pattern of milking every possible bit of fear and suspense out of viewers at the approach of tropical weather systems. It hardly seems to matter that computer models are roughly as accurate as a Ouija board while a storm is more than 48 hours out, or that storms like Allison are rare beasts indeed, for these days our doughty weatherpersons breathlessly report every developing tropical depression as if the End Times were upon us. Coverage increases in intensity until the tension is almost to much to take.

I call it "hurricane porn."

First, there's the foreplay, which (unlike in actual pornography) can take several days. It starts with Doppler radar and satellite images that grow progressively larger and, dare I say it, more tumescent as the system approaches the coast. Cloud cover grows and the winds pick up, and most TV stations will have reporters positioned along the coast in areas projected to be in the storm's path. These hardy souls eye the camera with come hither looks of dire urgency (I wish I could find screen captures of local ABC reporter Jessica Willey standing on a pier in Galveston during Claudette's rainy approach wearing a soaked-through white blouse - more than ratings were rising that evening, let me tell you). The anticipation continues to build in this fashion until landfall, which is where you get...

Hot hurricane action: water crashes furiously over the sea wall, palm trees whip back and forth in an orgiastic frenzy and street signs waggle suggestively in the wind. Meanwhile, the rhythmically swaying area street lights almost seem to keep the beat for the omnipresent frenzy. This is the period where one sees the most pervasive coverage. TV stations will often interrupt regular programming in order to cut to live shots of their other reporters, who can be found "braving" the storm by standing right in the middle of the heaviest wind and rains. Speaking only for myself, I'd have a lot more respect for a newsperson who did their report from a bar, sipping a beer and leading off with, "You know, you'd have to be a real idiot to be outside on a night like this..." Maybe someday.

Fortunately, the actual hurricane footage can only last so long, as most systems weaken rapidly once they make landfall. This is why television stations are so desperate for that money shot. You'll know it when you see it: a roof flying off a department store and disintegrating, or one of those aforementioned reporters getting blown into a ditch. If the networks are really lucky, they'll get film of a fireman rescuing a baby from a rooftop, or a woman pulled from her car just before it's covered by rising floodwaters. After something like that, you can't help but feel spent.

Once the storm has blown inland, you can finally bask in the afterglow: blue sky shots of boats beached thirty feet above the tide line, hapless shmoes sweeping water out of their bedrooms, and the weatherman telling us it "could've been worse." That's when you light a cigarette and compare property damage with your neighbors.

I'm waiting for the NOAA to extend hurricane season by a month and a half so it can include May and November sweeps.

Hyperbolic local news broadcasts are nothing new. We Houstonians are regularly treated to investigative reports about strip clubs and hard hitting stories about local contestants on "American Idol" and the like. The problem with hurricane porn is the same as with the boy who cried wolf, then the wolf raised him as one of her own and the boy went on to found Los Lobos...or something: it's hard to pay much attention to the stormcrows when the storms keep veering off into Louisiana or Brownsville. Eventually, another monster hurricane is going to hit Houston, and we're all going to be screwed because we're waiting for Jessica Willey's bikini-cam report.
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Post-Rita, I wouldn't be surprised if a number of those who camped out on I-45 for 25 hours might not be a little more inclined to gut it out next time around. We'll probably find out soon enough.