“People imagining a ‘female’ hurricane were not as willing to seek shelter,” Shavitt said. “The stereotypes that underlie these judgments are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women – they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men.”
Huh.
Aren’t most storms female named. I can’t really recall them being named Hurricane Steve or Hurricane Mike. I never lived on the East coast so I only hear of the major ones and I just remember them all being female names or maybe mostly female names.
So if Katrina had been named Karl everyone would have left new Orleans before it hit.
And Sandy sure was warm and hardly aggressive at all.
The article says:
Hurricanes have been named since 1950. Originally, only female names were used; male names were introduced into the mix in 1979.
You could kind of argue that the old female naming was sort of sexist - hell hath no fury, and all that.
I don’t think so - ships are still named after females too (at least to my knowledge they still are). My point being it was not one sided. I guess it is the way you take it. Don’t mess with me is the way I view a Hurricane and a mother protecting her child is certainly like a hurricane (though I understand your point).
Huh, indeed. As someone who’s lived in various hurricane-prone areas, that attitude is impossible for me to fathom. I rated danger the same way meteorologists did, on the 5 point Saffir-Simpson scale. I couldn’t care less about their names.
A lot of people did not leave because they were receiving contradicting information so they were not sure what to do. The news kept going back and forth.
70 tornadoes were created due to Katrina’s effects with 12 of them in the area we served. I gave up my job to help was the best experience for my kids and they still go to help, my oldest son when to Haiti right after the earthquake hit.
My family served at ground zero which was in the area of Bay Saint Louis, MIssissippi. We were there for six months living in a baseball field. In the beginning the camp was serving about 6,000 a day. Later the camp changed from food to helping get people back into their homes.
The weirdest things I saw were a car full of mud that landed on an iron fence and was perfectly balanced and did not fall off! The width of the bar it was sitting on was the circumference of my arm. It was unbelievable!
Cars in groups sunk with engine down facing the ground (density is in the front at the engine) and were buried and looked like tombstones (these were hurricane people so they would park their cars in groups about ten miles inland. The surge went in at 40 feet high, ten miles inland. The people never saw anything like that before.
I will never forget that one house was totally missing but the long wooden stairs were left. They build their house on stilts so this was a high staircase made of wood and not strong. You sit there and wonder - the house is gone but not the stairs?
You say “huh.”
I say “Darwin doing what Darwin does.”
IIRC, it was sexist. Hurricanes were named after females because they were unpredictable…
The major ones in my lifetime I can think of off the bat are Hugo, Andrew, Rita, Katrina, and Sandy. That’s two male, two female, one androgynous.
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia’s list of retired hurricane names (a pretty good guide to the most important ones of all time) I see that Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed eleven fucking thousand people in Central America, topping the Galveston hurricane of 1900 and apparently every other hurricane since 1780 in recorded loss of life. And yet I don’t recall it being a big news item, probably because it left the US pretty much unscathed.
Actually most ships are named after men, typically leaders/admirals. They’re referred to as women, but not named as such.
See: The entire US Carrier Fleet, pretty much all of WW2’s German navy, etc. Really the only one I can think of is some British vessels named after queens, which is the whole leader naming thing.
I think it depends on where you were/are. Most people think of New Orleans with Katrina, and the fact is that Katrina wouldn’t have been nearly as big a deal as it was (at least in the New Orleans area) if the levees hadn’t broken. That said, many people I talked to after Katrina didn’t evacuate because past warnings had proven false, so (logically) this one would, too.
I’m reminded of the disclaimer that comes on financial statements about how past returns are no guarantee of future performance.
And GeeWhiz, good on you (and your family!) for donating your time after the hurricane to help others. I wish I had done the same.
Hurricane Sandy was a female name, coming after Rafael in the 2012 storm names list. Experts expect the name to be retired, but those decisions aren’t made officially until the World Meteorological Organization’s Region IV committee holds its meeting in April.
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When will we, as a society, stop with the Storm Shaming?
This story has been covered by a few news shows here. The response is hilarious laughter across the board. People here take all storms pretty seriously. The folks that don’t are the tourists. They have hurricane parties. They sometimes drown.
… no, wait.