Irene Follow-up

I thought I was done with Irene after my last rant-like post. Turns out I'm not. Thanks Facebook.

I have bookmarked the Henry Margusity Fan Club on Facebook. It is the first page that opens for me and probably the main reason I even started paying attention to the site to begin with. Henry Margusity is the severe weather expert at Accuweather. Not only is he that, but he constantly discusses weather for the northeast, including every little to big snowstorm. On top of that he is very interactive whether it be through the page, on his blog, doing live discussions or through video updates. Now that we are moving into the third or fourth day past the storm, people on the page are still making comments about the predictions that were made. It has even become pretty heated amongst the regulars. Then Henry jumped in and posted the following (skip the middle portion):

Let me first state that I am glad he said that. I haven't heard anybody even remotely say they were inaccurate. And secondly, this is the exact point I was trying to make in my last post. I'm not taking away anything from the storm and the damage it caused, BUT the real focus should have been on the places that nobody talked about. When I woke up Monday morning, the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore was in Vermont covering what had been the flood. The raging waters were back to streams. Cantore had been covering the storm from New York City. A place that didn't see anything close to what was predicted. Instead, Cantore was left to witness the devastation in Vermont through pictures and videos on the internet. Just like the rest of us. And Cantore is from Vermont. Every person they interviewed said the exact same thing. We weren't expecting this.

As Henry stated, I have moved on. I just wanted to put my two cents in since following weather is clearly a passion of mine. Many people are still cleaning up and will be for awhile. Others have lost people they love. Even in areas throughout the Lehigh Valley and Berks, areas I don't consider taking a hard hit, people are still without power and could be for what ends up being a week. This is all part of weather. Chances are pretty good that another location in the U.S. gets hit before the season is over.

Personally, I saw my breath yesterday morning which has always been a favorite day of mine. It means we are getting closer to winter. The July hot spell has long been forgotten and there are no others warm-ups in sight. Even saw the first winter weather watch posted for Montana the same day. But all this can wait for the next post.