Hurricane Hype Begins Now!

The Hurricane Season begins June 1, and the weather vultures have already begun hyping their non-stop 24 hour weather coverage. Don't get me wrong, hurricanes are very dangerous. But cynical opportunism is just as bad, and that is what has been going on in South Florida since Hurricane Andrew came along in 1992. Hurricane Andrew turned Bryan Norcross into a media superstar and millionaire because he stayed up the entire night of Hurricane Andrew broadcasting photos of homes being destroyed (thanks to the stringers that they had taking photos and risking their lives out in the hurricanes).

Because of the incredible celebrity (and riches) that Norcross got from exploiting Hurricane Andrew for all it was worth, a new breed of weather-person spawned in South Florida; The Hurricane Forecaster. These folks are weather-persons during most of the year, but during hurricane season they spend their time regularly interrupting television shows to let you know that there is a hurricane brewing near Chile, 2400 miles away. Then they let you know that in ten, fifteen, or thirty minutes they will interrupt the show again to give you an update on the storm. This goes on and on from June until November, when the hurricane season is finally over.

Besides getting people constantly hyped up about every possible storm in the western hemisphere, these weather vultures spend a lot of their time endorsing hurricane preparedness. This means that supermarkets, lumber companies, electrical generator sellers, and air-conditioning repair companies generously sponsor these Hurricane Warning shows and hurricane preparedness "specials" so that the weather vultures can lead the public running to the stores to buy millions of dollars in hurricane "protection." When hurricane season begins, you can see the happiness and joy on the faces of weather-persons like Don Noe. Every time a storm is brewing somewhere, they interrupt programming to announce a hurricane warning, and you can see they are over-joyed at the prospect of another opportunity to become the next hurricane celebrity, like Bryan Norcross.

Does all this hurricane exploitation save any lives? Sure. There are probably some morons that would not figure out that a hurricane was coming unless they saw constant warnings and updates every ten minutes on every television station. For the rest of us, the hurricanes are an unavoidable force of nature that you can prepare for in a reasonable manner without any hysteria. Hopefully someday soon Bryan Norcross, Don Noe, and the rest of these hurricane vultures will retire (or go to prison--former hurricane expert Bill Kamal is doing five years for kiddie porn. Did his guilty conscience drive him to self-destruct?) and open the way for weather-persons that have some sense of ethics and journalistic integrity.