I let out an annual sigh of relief after hurricane season passes.
Not because my neighborhood wasn’t damaged or none of my family members hurt by one of the year’s storms (for which I’m also routinely grateful), but because the meteorologists didn’t assign my name to one of these catastrophic monsters.
Honestly, imagine how much it must have sucked to be named Katrina in the fall of 2005.
Not that they could help it, but those girls must have felt a sense of connection, or perhaps even empathetic guilt, with the event. I know I would if for six months straight I heard continuous news reports of the colossal damage and devastation that “Rachel” inflicted on millions of people. Perhaps I would have gotten more involved in the relief efforts. Or requested I be referred to by a nickname, as many Katrinas became Kat in 2005.
So why do these climatic events get to be named just like newborns, especially when we know they can only be referred to in terms of destruction? It would be like naming new diseases or virus strains with human names (as in: “Ew, you caught a bad case of Leslie?”). It just doesn’t seem right.
As it turns out, the reason is purely for our own benefit. The World Meteorological Organization declares on its website that using short, distinctive names helps communication efforts when referencing a storm.
Of course I knew the naming process was more than just some dude sitting in a room watching the storm form on a screen and proclaiming, “This one looks like a Fay.” Yet it never occurred to me how methodical the process of storm naming actually is: it comes down to a simple list.
I know that you Penn kids like being on lists: the Dean’s list, the “easy A” class list, the list outside Denim on Thursday night. Well I don’t know about you, but this is one list I’m not so thrilled to be included on.
In any case, I certainly hope the 2008 hurricane season closes short of seventeen hurricanes originating out the Eastern North Pacific. Otherwise, I might be heading up the “Rachel relief fund.”
An RSS feed of The Spin is available
September 29th, 2008 at 6:01 am
[...] As soon as I realized that AirPennNet wasn’t working for anyone in Van Pelt, I expected riots, bidding wars on Ethernet cords and endless lines behind the computer stations that had the coveted connection. Perhaps the South Park episode where the Internet disappears lowered my expectations of humanity to a far greater degree than reality, for today I witnessed a natural calm where I foresaw disaster. [...]