Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Rains and Floods

If you hadn’t heard, parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma had terrible rains, floods and hail storms last week. I got calls from frantic relatives wondering if I was ok, but fortunately, I live on a hill that seems to protect me from most of the bad weather in the area.

I have never lived in a place where the major news is the weather. The meteorologist is the highlighted newscaster. He does events and has his own commercials. I personally get quite frustrated with the constant programming interruptions and alerts for “treacherous” weather. (They literally use the term treacherous when it is raining.) This is the first week that the weather really was dangerously bad and sadly we are expected to get more rain the end of this week.

I don’t plan to watch TV on the rainy days because I get so mad when the entire news hour is devoted to the rain. I looked outside the window. I know it is raining. If I was at home watching the news and my house started flooding, how would this help me?

Don’t get me wrong. I feel absolutely horrible for the people that have been affected by the storms. My complaint is that these people are not sitting at home in their flooded living rooms watching 2 hours worth of weather news to find out what is happening.

One of my coworkers took this picture last weekend in Rogers. Rogers is the city in between where I live and where I work. The highway was fine and I didn’t have any problems getting around, but this picture just looks like something you would see on a redneck email forward. Some days I can’t believe that I live here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a note - my sister lives in Austin. She had gone home sick and was watching TV - There was an ice storm and one of the newscast put on a Slide directing travelers to call this number if they had questions about the roads in the weather -- and the Number was hers! By the time she finished reading the slide, her phone started ringing --- End of story - she had to have her number changed!

Kanani said...

We get lots of news about weather at all --when there IS any to report about! Being in "sunny southern California" you can imagine that when even drizzles it garners up to the minute update on rain!

Hope the weather smooths out over the weekend.
xxx

Anonymous said...

Shannon -- I know you are from the Annapolis area - but do you remember WRC Channel 4 news ?? They have graphics and I have lived through many a "storm of the centry" -- that's where Katie Couric came from. I remember seeing her covering a downed power line in Bethesda

They still haven't changed --- The only thing that could be worse for them is a tornado during a Redskin game -- They would never leave the TV -- I remember they broke into the Olympics with a "Special Report" just to announce the Redskin quarterback (Doug Williams at the time) was having his appendix out!