Apocalypse fatigue

What if we had a hurricane tropical storm post-tropical system and nobody hunkered down?

Post-Tropical Storm Olga left tens of thousands of residents and businesses without power in metro New Orleans on Saturday, including at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, as wind gusts nearing 60 mph blew through the area, downing trees and causing other damage.

Not exactly total chaos, then.  Sure, there are a lot of power outages. But, really, that's always a possibility regardless of severe weather.  In fact, it happens so frequently, that a City Council committee just voted this week to fine Entergy $1 million for negligence.

At issue is Entergy’s move to partially defund its power distribution system four years ago, which council members and even the utility’s own representatives have said led to that system’s decline.

In 2013, Entergy diverted about $1 million in maintenance funding that had been slated for that system to other priorities. With less funding to perform repairs, equipment failures and resulting power outages soon became increasingly common in the city, Entergy Vice President Melonie Stewart admitted at a council meeting last year.

The utility also decreased the amount it spent on capital additions to the distribution system by about $21 million from 2014 to 2015, according to an analysis by the council’s consultants.

The Olga-related outages seem to have caused some headaches at the airport too. But compared with the headaches travelers are about to experience just getting to the new airport this doesn't seem too different.

Still, it's fair to say Olga was significantly stronger and more impactful than several storms whose approach have occasioned multiple emergency press conferences and shelter-in-place orders in recent years. According to the tweets, the howling winds woke at least half the city up in the middle of the night.  It woke me up. I thought there might have been a tornado or something.

In any case it was probably the biggest overnight surprise storm since Hurricane Cindy suddenly ballooned to life in 2005. Cindy knocked out power to over 250,000 homes which is significantly more than the 70,000 or so currently attributed to Olga.  But there were no evacuation orders and everybody went to work the next day anyway. A month later came Katrina and we've rarely been this casual about even the lightest of threats ever since.

So it's unusual for us to have been this cavalier about any tropical system. The most likely explanation is we didn't mean to be.  Olga developed and landed so quickly there wasn't enough time to go into panic mode let alone much information as to what we ought to panic about.  Another explanation is that we're just so dang tired of the world coming to an end every other week.  At least we thought the last post-tropical weather thingy was going to blow the death cranes down on everybody. After that, we're kind of ruined for these un-storms for a while.  It's getting to where if nothing has to be exploded, it's probably not that much of an emergency.