A while back I was watching the news about tropical storm Henri and hurricane Ida. Not that I want to dump on the news media, but what is it about the silly drama associated with anything involving the reporting of natural disasters. Just give us the facts. What is happening, where it is going, how big, how many people lost power, how dangerous is it. I don’t need to see some reporter being blown around by gusting winds, or wading in flood waters, or wearing a yellow fire shirt. Do I gain any insight into the storm, fire or flood? Oh hell no.
I live on the central Oregon Coast. We get gale force winds every winter. I stay indoors! If I was stupid enough to go out in the wind and rain, I’d lose my hat, my glasses would mist over, and I would get wet and cold. Somewhere around 50 miles an hour the wind can knock me down and tree limbs can break off and hit me in the boys. It is much more fun to watch and listen to the storm inside my dry and warm house while sipping a single malt. So why during IDA is middle aged Ali Velshi and his chrome dome standing out in the rain and wind. He is a lot richer and smarter than I am. Or so I thought. Ratings you say. Surly MSNBC they can do a little better than that. Watching CNN with Al Roker getting drenched on Bourbon Street was not any better. And someone has got to say it. Roker looked a lot better fat. I supposed I could switch to FOX, but I might drown in my own vomit.
Every once in a while, I have a big idea, and this one is a butte. If they really want to improve ratings, my eyes would be glued to the weather coverage if there were bikini girls getting drench. Not family friendly you say. Bull! Is the Olympics family friendly? Beach volleyball! I rest my case. And ESPN could even get in on this idea by hosting a wet t-shirt competition during a raging rainstorm. What could be more American than that? Remember lingerie football. I never missed a game.
Fires get the same ridiculous coverage. Inevitably the media will have some reporter wearing a hard hat and yellow fire shirt telling us how hard the fire crews are working. In my youth I worked summers for the US Forest Service and had the unfortunate experience of having to fight one small (15 acre) fire in rough terrain. We hiked down into the fire in the late afternoon and fought the bitch all night. Lucky for me it was pretty much out the next morning so that we could hike back up the mountain and get home to a nice shower and a good night’s sleep between clean sheets. What a dirty, dangerous, and exhausting job. On the fire I was on, I got an hour of sleep, waking up at first light to see an exhausted smoke jumper, who was sleeping too close the fire line. The soles of his boots were starting to smoke. I managed to wake him just in time. He muttered something and moved 6 inches before passing out again. I have nothing but respect for the people who do this year after year. At the ranger station where I was employed, there were several veteran fire fighters. One stood out. When I met him, he was in his mid-forties, short and wiry. A man of few words and not afraid of anything. A real hero. He and a few others from the station had been on a nasty fire a few years previous. Sometime in the middle of the night my hero needed to pee. The fire boss noticed him doing this and said, “better make that count”. So, he waddled over to a hollow log whose center was a glowing mass of embers and hosed it down with his own urine. Let’s see, hot coals…urine… steam explosion. Needless to say, having to fill out the accident report where you circled the injured part was bad enough, but to embarrass him even more, the district ranger made him give the report verbally to the absolutely gorgeous district secretary. As stated earlier, I have tremendous respect for forest fire fighters, but I vowed at that moment not to “make it count” if I ever found myself in a similar situation. But I digress. Back to reporters on wildfires.
Let me be clear about this. There is no way a reporter was going to be allowed near the fire that I was on. There is no way that they could get their equipment close and if they did, they would have to spent tons of money to clean up it up afterward. So, if they are not close to the fire, why the hard hat and fire shirt? And why do they always report the size of a fire in acres? It’s a fire not a crop and the average American has no concept of the size of an acre.
Floods get the same stupid media treatment. There is always a reporter in waders standing in water up to his crotch. As a marine biologist I have spent a lot of hours in waders. They chafe your crotch and are usually uncomfortably hot even in Pacific Northwest cold water. After 4 hours of working the mud flats, I have pulled mine off and poured out a cup of sweat from each leg. So here is our intrepid reporter wading around in dangerously polluted flood waters in water moccasin infested Louisiana. Did I mention that waders inevitably leak? Mine always did but I didn’t mind that much as I was on a pristine mudflat. Might smell a bit, but I didn’t have to worry about getting dick rot from some nasty bacteria being carried in sewage contaminate flood waters. So where is the cameraman? He is 10 feet away standing on dry land. He is not going to risk getting his camera anywhere near where it might be ruined by dirty water. Once again, the ratings could be improved by using bikini clad girls in the waders. Come to think of it I once had a calendar of that ilk. Girls in waders with a fly rod in one hand and wearing almost nothing else. Then Judy found it. Not a good use of shop wall space.
On a different note, who names these storms? As I noted above, where I live, we occasionally get a real monster windstorm. Had three in the 40 years I’ve live here. We don’t name these storms. Maybe we would get more national attention if we did. However, we would never, ever name a storm Henri (on ree). What the fuck, that’s French! Storm names should be scarry, Bubba, Guido, Karen, Rocky, Tonya. With Henri, I pictured a 5- and 1/2-foot skinny guy wearing a beret with a scarf artfully wrapped around his neck, who is walking home with Bree and a baguette. Henri is not a name that would make me want to go to an evacuation center to sleep on a cot and listen to babies cry all night. The French have not had a real scary guy since Napoleon who by the way was 5’6”, wore a funny hat, and probably had a belly button fetish. And even he was not that scarry as they named a deliciously layered vanilla creamed filled puff pastry after him. Not scary. Would you buy that pastry if it was named Adolf or Judy. Now those are scarry names.