Dan's Papers - August 10, 2007 - Hurricanes! Look Out!

Every year, the Long Island Lighting Company publishes a beautiful, full-color glossy program about the upcoming hurricane season. They've been doing this for five years and usually, the program is received in these parts in late June just before the official start of the season on July 1.

It's printed at great expense. And it is distributed on countertops and souvenir brochure racks in bed and breakfasts and in the centerfold of certain select newspapers.

One section of it is about how LIPA is prepared for the upcoming season and there are pictures of men and women sitting at computers, wearing hard hats in front of trucks and so forth and so on, in a great state of readiness.

And although this year is no exception in that regard, LIPA was nevertheless late in getting the program into the hands of residents this year. My copy came inside a New York Times on August 1, with the season well underway. In it are references to things that they predict would happen this year in June, BEFORE the start of the hurricane season, so this was just pretty bad, although it did put me in mind of the bumbles made by FEMA in reacting late to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in 2005. Those were the days.

I like getting this program. It reminds me of the sort of program you can buy when you go to the ballpark. There are pictures of the players, the stadium, the mascot, the time they won the World Series and the prospects for the upcoming season.

In the past, the annual Hurricanes of Long Island program has had a series of full- color photographs of the hurricanes that hit the Island the year before, including colorful arrows of the paths they took, the devastation they caused, the satellite view of what they looked like and the subsequent prediction of the year ahead.

This year's program, however, is a disappointment.

There are no wonderful pictures of last year's hurricanes, because there weren't any hurricanes. Instead, there are lots and lots of pictures of pleasure boats piled up on a superhighway, which is not our Long Island Expressway or Sunrise, but some highway in Alabama. There's a photograph of waves crashing into vacation homes causing considerable devastation, but it was taken in Key West, Florida several years ago. And on the front cover this year is a picture, taken by a FEMA employee, of a flood in New Orleans in 2005. They could have done better than that.

Even the main feature article in the program is lame. It's an apology to the reader and an explanation of what went wrong in 2006 when they predicted twelve hurricanes but got none. It is titled, "THE 2006 HURRICANES THAT NEVER HIT. WHAT HAPPENED?"

LIPA's explanation of what went wrong last year is totally incomprehensible.

"The Bermuda high pressure guided the hurricanes coming off the west coast of Africa, turning them 270 degrees so that they headed toward Europe rather than the U. S. East Coast. Forecasters knew that the Bermuda High would be moving eastward into the Atlantic Ocean, which was the reason that the pathway was open for hurricanes to advance up the U. S. East Coast. But what was not known was that this high pressure system would move so far east so as to turn all the hurricanes far out into the Atlantic."

"The reason for the 'year of the shear' was the onset of a weak El Nino. This phenomenon was also responsible for the devastating forest fires in the U. S. Southwest. This same El Nino also generated the high speed upper atmospheric winds that sheared off the Atlantic tropical storms -- basically decapitating many of the developing storms and shutting down the hurricane season." So there you are.

This sort of thing reminds me of, for instance, the Chicago Cubs baseball team trying to explain why they hadn't won a World Series since 1923. And they show pictures of some other team winning the World Series.

And this year, there's not even a prediction of the upcoming year's prospects. After last year's disastrous prediction, they won't even go out on a limb, even though it's pretty common knowledge that the season is expected to be "above average."

There is some good stuff in the program, though. For example, the program lists all the Hurricane names for 2007. Among them are Chantal, Barry, Humberto, Olga and Sebastian. These are pretty cool. My favorite is Rebekkah. Although, because it begins with an R, we'll have to wait quite a while to get it and we may not get it at all. They've got names for every hurricane from A to, well, W. There's nothing for X, Y or Z. And no explanation of why.

You can read the mission statement for the E. L. I. C. C. A. in this program. This is a unique feature. The letters stand for the Eastern Long Island Coastal Conservation Alliance and a lot of good work they do, too.

And there is hope for those of us who are worried about global warming.

"We are presently living during the 'climatic optimum.' The earth should be at a turning point with temperatures poised to plunge us toward another Ice Age," the program says.

Who knew? All we have to do is wait out the global warming.

Also in the program is the ever-familiar be-prepared-for-the-hurricane checklist, which is always helpful.

Have a battery powered radio, keep spare bottles of water in the basement, get lots of canned food with a manual can opener and be prepared to respond when asked to evacuate, keep a flashlight handy, get candles and matches, blah blah blah.

The only thing that really bothers me about the 2007 HURRICANES LONG ISLAND program is the very thick and very expensive paper it is printed on. I have criticized them for this before. All together, they have printed and given out over 100,000 copies of it this year, they say, which is enough for one out of every forty six people who live on Long Island and that's nice and all, but this printing job must have consumed at least thirty tons of trees, because its on thick glossy paper, with all those dangerous chemicals they have to put on the glossy paper to protect it.

As I've said every year - I'm repeating myself again, probably to no effect - it is time they printed this program on newsprint, the thin and eco-friendly paper that you are reading this article on today. The way they do it now is not only enormously expensive -- I do know the cost of the printing is borne by the customers so that makes it okay -- but requires the buzz-sawing of more than 4,000 acres of Amazon rainforest, with the subsequent uprooting of tens of thousands of forest-dwelling natives sent fleeing into crocodile-infested rivers and the consequent increased stratospheric pollution on global warming resulting in, among other things, more hurricanes.

Oh, wait. The hotter it gets, the more air conditioning we'll need and the more LIPA makes. I get it.