"Wayne B" wrote in message ...
On Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:45:44 -0700 (PDT), Tim
wrote:


Just be glad it was. But still... 9 dead from the storm.

correction -18 deaths attributed to Irene, so far.

Yes but some of the attributions are a bit of a stretch in my opinion.
If you have a heart attack or accident while shopping for a generator
or while nailing up plywood is that the fault of the storm? (not real
examples but some are similar)


Excellent point about the deaths. Most of them are due to human stupidity or human infirmity and probably would have happened anyway even if there was no hurricane. People who die because they drown in a flash flood, for example. Did they die because of the hurricane or did they die because they never learned not to drive their cars across swollen rivers? It doesn't take a hurricane to overflow a river as they overflow regularly in normal wet weather patterns. Or did they die because they couldn't swim or had a weak heart and were the typical, out of shape couch potato?

Just like every patch of clouds in the Atlantic or Gulf this year has been called a tropical storm to pad the record and hype things up so do most of the deaths that occur durning a hurricane but really have little or nothing to do with the hurricane suffer from the hype factor.

If the electricity goes out in a nursing home and some ancient person dies because his oxygen pump stopped working should that be blamed on the hurricane or should it be called an inevitable death from infirmity and old age? Some idiot is out walking under the trees when the wind is blowing 60mph and gets crushed by a big branch that fell on him (the first death in N.C.). Is that a hurricane death or a Darwin Award death that could just as easily happened during a thunder storm?


Wilbur Hubbard