pezstar's Journal: Angry beyond words

I am royally pissed off this morning. I mean... ROYALLY pissed off. If you can load it (it's java) http://radar.weather.gov/radar/loop/DS.p19r0/si.kmhx.shtml . There. My parents and grandparents live in Morehead City. The right, front quadrant of that god forsaken hurricane is starting to bear down on them now. My parents were told to go to work this morning. This in and of itself isn't too much of a problem because the winds will stay below 50 until around 2 this afternoon. The problem is that this leaves my 80 year old grandparents home alone.

For those who don't know, I'm a weather geek. I went to school for meteorology... I didn't finish, but seriously, I know as much about weather, specifically hurricanes, as any PhD carrying employee of the National Hurricane Center. I called this storm as going right into Onslow Bay a week ago. Go me. I always get them right.

At any rate, a 70 knot hurricane isn't really all that bad... especially when you live in a town that has had 9 hurricanes in the last few years. Most of the stuff that was going to get blown over was destroyed in the first few, so pretty much everything that's left is strong enough to withstand anything less than 130mph winds. This storm is a little different than your average category one storm, though. They come through and last about 6 hours and then you're done. This one is moving painfully slow and they are going to have sustained tropical storm force winds for about 24 hours and hurricane force for at least 12. That is no joke... you don't play around with that.

My family has a hurricane plan. If the winds are less than 115, they stay. If they're higher than 115, they leave. If they stay, my grandparents, brothers and sister, all the kids and the dogs, etc. all go over to my parents' house where my nut case father has accumulated a lifetime supply of food, potable water, sterno and bleach. This way, everyone is together and we don't have to worry about anyone.

This is not happening. My parents were up until 4am boarding up my grandparents' windows because I'm not there to say "Hey. Dumbshits. There's a hurricane coming. You have trees. Maybe you want to, you know, prevent them from coming inside?" I'm not there this year to go around to all the redneck neighbors and make them lay down their swingsets and put their 4 wheelers in their garages and pick up their lawn furniture and whatnot so it doesn't fly into my parents 300,000 dollar house. (By Boston standards, 300,000 dollars for a house is nothing. By North Carolina standards, it's very nice.)

My parents are too passive to actually tell their bosses to fuck off, so now my grandparents are sitting alone during a hurricane. So. Pissed. Off.

Ok. I ranted like a maniac and I feel better.

weather nerd

[blinder]

heh... i'm a bit of a weather nerd myself. back in the late 90's my sister and i were volunteer weather spotters for the local weather service. not "storm chasers" of course... but when bad storms would come into the area, we'd go out and look for damage and call it into the weather service. that was fun... learned how to read the clouds (like what to look for... like if you see mammatus clouds, you can bet that you are very near a nasty storm... ala super cell).

and how to read a radar, and look at lift ind

Re:weather nerd

[pezstar]

I'm a spotter, too. I did an internship with the National Severe Storms Forecast Center (now the Storm Prediction Center) in Norman, Ok when I was 20 and basically spent a spring semester just chasing storms in the plains. I've never been so bored in my life. It was days and days of just driving around cornfields until we finally saw rotation and whatnot. Twister makes me laugh.