Katrina Returns, Sans Waves
Tomorrow’s New York Times reports that Katrina Leskanich, the former lead singer of Katrina and the Waves, has a solo album coming out next month. The release date was originally set for September 5, which would have been really crappy timing.
The article also quotes a few other non-hurricanes named Katrina (though it missed my sister in law), and there seems to be a consensus among them that naming hurricanes after people is a bad idea. At the risk of sounding like a naive foreigner, I must confess that I agree. When California’s disasters strike, usually in the form of earthquakes, we name the damned things after the location of their epicenter, not after any individuals who did nothing to cause them. I take some comfort in the fact that when a nasty earthquake struck Northridge in 1994, it didn’t occur to anyone to name it “Earthquake Xrlq,” and I think I can safely assume Aphrael, Doc Rampage (or maybe not) and Bill Quick are similarly pleased that there was never any danger of the Loma Prieta earthquake being named after them, either. And it’s not just earthquakes that don’t get human names; it’s just about everything but hurricanes. We all remember the mudslides that trashed a few homes in Laguna Beach and pretty much wiped out La Conchita last year, but did we really need to call them Mudslide Richard and Mudslide Alex? I don’t think so. If the September 11 attacks had occurred on a date whose numbers don’t coincide with the number we dial in emergencies (or if we’re idiots upset that we didn’t “have it our way” at Burger King), we might not call that dreadful day “9-11,” but we sure as hell wouldn’t call it “Terrorist Attack Noam,” tempting though that may be. So why name hurricanes?
September 10th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
Perhaps this has something to do with having to track hurricanes over the course of days (during which time there might be other active hurricanes), and to alert common folk of what’s incoming, rather than naming for posterity. Earthquakes, mud slides, and terrorist attacks are generally unexpected, short-lived, and localized. Forest fires, however, seem like a good Californian counterpart to hurricanes, and we don’t name them in the same way, so what I said might be off.
Why not name hurricanes after the infamous? Hurricane Joseph Stalin, Hurricane Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Hurricane Jane Fonda, etc.
September 10th, 2005 at 10:58 pm
Are you kidding? I’d *pay* to have a city-destroying earthquake named after me. I can see the quotes now: “Oh sure, the 1906 San Fransisco quake was bad, but in sheer inflation-adjusted dollars worth of destruction, nothing compares to Doc Rampage of 20xx.”
September 10th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
Doc: I sit corrected.
Nels: to some extent, we already do that, e.g., Hurricane Andrew (Sullivan), Hurricane Hugo (Chavez), and now Hurricane Katrina (van den Heuvel).
September 11th, 2005 at 8:53 am
I suppose you could go back to not calling them anything, but since they come alphabetically during the year (Andrew was the first Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Tropical Depression) (Tropical Depressions take a letter, but not a name, IIRC, so we had Katrina, Trop Depressions L M N, and now Tropical Storm/Hurricane Ophelia.
September 11th, 2005 at 8:54 am
…oops.
but since you are going to call them something to track the season, names are as good as anything.
September 11th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Why not keep with the single letter whether or not it is a depression/storm/hurricane? If you are talking about storms in the past, prefix them with the year. So rather than Katrina who doesn’t deserve her name ruined like that, it would be 2005K. And Ophelia would be 2005O. Andrew would have been 1992A. And so on.
September 12th, 2005 at 8:59 am
Part of the point is to be able to distinguish hurricanes from different years, which the single-letter scheme wouldn’t do; hurricanes are named on a multi-year cycle, so any name which is used this year won’t be next year, etc.
Also, names of particularly destructive hurricanes are typically removed from the naming pool, which gives them a permanent unique identifier.
And yes, i would prefer not to have an earthquake named after me. :)
September 12th, 2005 at 9:09 am
[Irrelevant crap that was spammed to this thread and two others, and which, if repeated again, will get this user banned.]
September 12th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
Name the disasters after the governor of the state where the hurrican does the most damage, or hits first. But let them have a 24 hr. grace period to resign before the hurricane arrives and let the next in line get all the notoriety.
September 12th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Last year there was some serious complaints when the names “Jesus” and “Israel” were suggested for future hurricanes (part of an attempt to be more Hispanic/”multicultural.”) Headlines like “Israel kills hundreds” or “Jesus destroys homes” were considered less than desirable after some debate.
September 15th, 2005 at 9:57 am
(Tropical Depressions take a letter, but not a name, IIRC, so we had Katrina, Trop Depressions L M N, and now Tropical Storm/Hurricane Ophelia.
Tropical depressions are numbered, not lettered. There were tropical storms or hurricanes, with names, for each of the letters between Katrina and Ophelia — they just didn’t come ashore to the U.S. so most people never heard of Tropical Storm Lee, Hurricane Maria, or Hurricane Nate.
The name-list rotation is six years.
aving a wife who works for the National Weather Service can be very useful. Or it can give me knowledge like what I’m imparting here…
September 17th, 2005 at 6:10 am
The hurricane had hardly ben gone when the eco-freaks and the liberal left-wing news media were already yammering about global warming being the cuase of hurricane katrina and why it was so servere the biggist amount of hot air came from the enviromentalist wackos and the political hacks in their service