The Daily News Should Try Paying Attention

This headline is utterly unfair to the National Weather Service and the meteorological profession. There was "flood watch" 18 hours before the flood began. The NWS, Dr. Ryan Maue, AccuWeather and others did an outstanding job with the forecasts. 

It isn't the fault of the meteorological profession that the Daily News and others were not paying attention, especially when there are apps that will alert you automatically when watches and warnings are issued for your location. If someone at the Daily News will send me an email, I will describe how to set them up on their smartphones -- and, most of them are free. 

Part II

I have additional information I would like to provide. 

I was finally able to get through the Daily News enewspaper software to read the entire article. The essential issue was, "Why didn't the mayor tell us?!" The mayor?

As we have discussed on many occasions, there is this odd part of East Coast culture where the major of the largest cities is supposed to be some type of oracle pertaining to hazards facing the residents of their cities. 

The issue is that mayors are not meteorologists and NYC mayors, in particular, have a long history of misinforming their citizens. 

For example, as Hurricane Sandy made its deadly approach to the NY-NJ area, NYC Mayor Bloomberg played down the threat:

“Although we’re expecting a large surge of water, it is not expected to be a tropical storm or hurricane-type surge. With this storm, we’ll likely see a slow pileup of water rather than a sudden surge, which is what you would expect with a hurricane, and which we saw with Irene 14 months ago.

“So it will be less dangerous..."

Of course, lower Manhattan flooded and lives were lost two days later. In the eleven years since this terrible statement, I've documented many times when politicians mislead their constituents. 

The Daily News didn't bother to interview meteorologists about the advisories we issued the day before the flood. I guess the facts would have gotten in the way of the story. 

Regardless of where you live, you should receive your information about weather threats directly from meteorologists. That can be the National Weather Service or it can be a trusted local meteorologist, or it can be an organization like AccuWeather.