BEWARE of the weather channel

If you don't know what spaghetti models are, move to Florida for a year.  You will soon learn what they are.   In fact, during certain times between June and November, you will sit for hours, staring at the television, entranced by ever shifting spaghetti models, marveling at the gap between American and European versions of this strange form of colorful pasta draped, laced, and curved around, over, and through the Florida peninsula.  And, depending on what channel you are watching, you may experience anything from escalating panic to chronic anxiety to pragmatic determination.   If you are not a huge fan of the first two emotions, stay away from the national news outlets, especially the Weather Channel.

Spaghetti models are a cluster of potential paths that a hurricane or other tropical disturbance may take as it approaches land, landfall, and damage, destruction, and drama.   Florida is the lucky winner of much of this unique form of pasta during hurricane season.   Seeing your town or city with a piece of pasta draped over it will prompt you to check the weather a little bit more often.  Seeing a whole plate of pasta blotting out your town or city will prompt you to check the weather more frequently than your text messages.   Watching these models shift east, west, north, and south can unravel your nerves like... spaghetti.

Watching the Weather Channel can take those raw, unraveled nerves and turn them into mental disease and defect.  Watch the Weather Channel during an approaching hurricane and be prepared to experience high blood pressure, adrenaline cocktails, and any number of unhealthy physiological responses that not only endanger your health but can prevent you from doing what needs to be done during an approaching hurricane -- diligent, strategic preparation.   As for me personally, I have trouble distinguishing between C and D size batteries (think flashlights and power outages for extended periods of time) when someone is preaching doom, gloom, and apocalypse in my ear.   Listening to the weather channel while putting storm shutters up has also been associated with significantly higher rates of cut, bruised, and smushed fingers (think hammers, sharp metal edges, and other artifacts associated with protecting houses from nasty winds and storm surges).   Catch a whiff of the Weather Channel while filling sandbags and say hello to a stubbed or worse, broken toe.  

Other national news outlets are not off the hook either.   While others around the country might be drawn to the shock and awe of photos and videos of the most dramatic damage a hurricane or tropical storm has dished out over its existence, those who are still predicted to experience that storm showing up at their doorstep don't want to see or hear it.   The emergency beacons emitting from cell phones to evacuate, take shelter, and other such emergency measures are sufficient to stimulate more than enough adrenaline to catalyze action. No further adrenaline is necessary.  Go away Weather Channel, New York Times, and the rest.

Which brings me to the local weather channels in Tampa Bay.   Until Irma came, I had no idea that meteorologists could do double time reporting the weather and providing masterful counseling to a population panicked and anxious about being in the bullseye of an approaching hurricane.   However that is exactly what a gifted local meteorologist like Paul Dellegatto (Fox 13) does.   I am not singling out Mr. Dellegatto as the only excellent meteorologist in the Bay area -- he just happens to be my favorite, because he also manages to be funny in the face of approaching disaster.

Hour after hour, he stands in front of a map of Florida, as the familiar shape of the peninsula is gradually covered by the ragged edges of green, orange, and red rain bands that mark the outside perimeter of an oncoming hurricane.  He explains each band in detail, remarks on the slightest shift east and west of the eye of the storm, switches seamlessly over to a detailed prediction of wind gusts, hour by hour.

Interspersed among all the details of what it means for a hurricane to pass over your head, he calmly explains, when there is no longer any hope that the eye will suddenly turn away and pass your city, what will happen next.   Rather than pushing the many available alarm buttons in your body chemistry, the best of meteorologists in these situations gradually and masterfully draw you to a point where you can accept that "When you wake up tomorrow and walk outside, what you see may very well be completely unfamiliar to you."  Then, they add  "..but we will be here with you."

It's as if you will stare at the foundation where your house once sat and somehow, a meteorologist standing by your side will make it all bearable.   At the time before the winds come up and the power goes out, whether sheltered in place or elsewhere, you believe that it will all be OK.

If hurricanes ever go extinct, some of our local weather reporters and meteorologists should become counselors and therapists.  I have no doubt that they would have a gift for it!

Alternatively, they could go work for the Weather Channel and lay waste to the the ongoing alarmist reporting and video that draws national ratings and viewers but neither praise from nor peace for the locals impacted by these weather calamities.