Red sky in the morning - storm warning

A friend recently moved from Georgia to Florida and I have been treated to a series of photographs. They have alligators in a lake on the property that they live in and it seems to be perfectly acceptable for their four-year-old to stand on the edge and talk to it. Perhaps that's how it's done there. I also got a link to Florida Hazard Watch. It's quite exciting until you actually click on the links and read it, since it's been written by the same guild of artists that write the deep and meaningful regulation boards in the airports. There is much reiteration of nothings in the tone of voice that comes in installation CDs. A mere storm is nothing compared to the awful horrors that will be visited on those who haven't got the prescribed survival packs. Cute little terms like StormReady and Firewise leach all the power and glory from the phenomena. It also makes you wonder that any life exists in Florida at all when they seem to be battered by every kind of severe weather there is, except volcanoes, practically all the time. As if the large and legitimate problems from earth, wind and water are not enough, they have also added to their particular list what the official sites are pleased to call space weather events. And of course terrorism. And something that is labelled surprisingly tersely as simply "nuclear". You get the impression that what life there is must be paranoid, psychotic and lived curled into a tight ball in a concrete bunker.

But they also had this animation of the different kinds of damage inflicted by different kinds of storms. It leaves you feeling that maybe a survival pack is not such a bad idea – though I don't see how it'll help in a Category 5 unless it includes a collapsible hovercraft.