Bad weather in PHX

pilot602

pilot602

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Whew! Man I hope everyone stocked up last night. The weather guys nailed this storm! It's horrible outside.

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Seriously, WTF is up with the TV news in this town. Everytime a storm works up on the coast they start ringing the disaster bells. You'd think they'd have learned that by bening in the middle of a desert that anything of any signifigance that forms on the coast - or anywhere, really - gets sucked dry by the time it reaches PHX.

Bah.

At least they didn't send the choppers up to "look at the storm."
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Try living in Florida when a Tropical Storm or Hurricane is - oh 300 freakin' miles off the coast.

I swear I think the networks are in cahoots with Home Depot, Lowe's and every grocer out there.

"Stock up!" "Get ready" "buy this - buy that!" "this could be bad"...... and the storm peters out over whater and you're stuck with a garage full of crap you'll never use.

Ahhhh - Florida.
 
Yeah but at least a hurricane could actually hit you.

We live in a DESERT!
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The "fullest" lake near here is at 50% capacity!
 
I have to say I did enjoy Florida's newscasting antics during hurricane season - they made such fools of themselves that it was actually fun to watch them wait the storm out and report on the hour what was happening during the hurricane- ON the beach side.
 
Nothing beats watching newscasters nearly get blown into the surf all in the name of reporting. I like watching the Weather Channel during hurricane season. There's always some guy on a beach getting hammered with 100 mph winds and rain in a parka. I think this is their initiation for the new people....
 
We had a (supposed) snowstorm last weekend. Beginning Thursday night, the TV weatherpeople started talking like friggin' Armageddon was going to smack KC upside the head. Even the National Wx Service was calling for 10-15 inches of snow. Several stations were saying "at least a foot, maybe a foot and a half."

(as an aside, I've lived here my whole life and the biggest snowstorm we ever had in my lifetime was 14 inches, over 10 years ago, a big snowstorm for us is 6 or 7 and that happens maybe once every 2 years)

Anyhow, they started creating banners that went across the bottom of the screen while they were talking about our impending disaster, entitled "Super Storm 2004" or the like (seriously!)

What did that create? The grocery stores, beginning Friday, were so packed that people had to park on side streets because the parking lots were full. I usually grocery shop on Sunday, and since it was supposed to hit overnight Saturday, I did so on Saturday morning. I waited in line for 30 MINUTES. Bread? Out. Milk? good thing I drink skim, because that was almost all that was left. Sale items? All gone. The wait at Wal-mart for an oil change was 6 HOURS (my sister tried to get her truck in).

It was nuts. Gas stations were a mess, bank looked like it was having a going-out-of-business sale...you get the picture. So, does it come as any surprise that they said on the radio this morning that Kansas City had the largest share of viewers (per capita) watching the Super Bowl? Yeah, because no one went anywhere!

So this storm. What actually happened, you ask? Well, the VERY warm air that had been aloft all week stayed that way, and we had freezing rain. Then some sleet. Then on Sunday, it just rained all afternoon. It in fact melted some of our existing snow, and we had less on the ground than before "Super Storm 2004!" hit. It changed briefly to snow Monday AM. Because the temps were near freezing, the road crews had an easy go of getting salt down and the roads were seldom worse than just wet with some slush between the tire tracks. We got ONE HALF OF ONE INCH of snow, with a bunch of slushy ice underneath it.

So much for "Super Storm 2004!"
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THAT'S been the big news story this week - how badly they screwed the forecast up, and ruined all the bar business on Sunday for the game!
 
It rained here for the first time in about a month; you should have seen the news networks: updates every 5 minutes, touting the horn of the "Live Doppler 7000 Plus"...

So then I decided to go to the gym, people sure drive sloooooowly in the rain... half the people were doing 30 in a 45 zone
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touting the horn of the "Live Doppler 7000 Plus"...


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Yeah, long ago I noticed that Channel 2 had Doppler 2000, Channel 4 had the Doppler 4000, and Channel 7 had the Doppler 7000, what a crock of ****. On a side note, when I was in PHX 3 years ago there was an ice storm, that kind of defeated the purpose of leaving MI in the winter.
 
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Live Doppler 7000 Plus

[/ QUOTE ] gotta love that.. living in central florida, one of the channels had super doppler 9000 or something like that and doug and I would always crack up and start saying "super doppler 900 million trillion" as if it meant anything....
 
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The wait at Wal-mart for an oil change was 6 HOURS (my sister tried to get her truck in). It was nuts. Gas stations were a mess, bank looked like it was having a going-out-of-business sale.

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If you're going to be trapped in the house because the snow is too deep to drive in, then why does it matter if your car has fresh oil and a full tank of gas, and a load of cash in your wallet?
 
hmmmm... good question! I think it's all about the new stations getting everyone hyped up and in a panic...so you feel like you have to get everything done "JIC" (just in case)

Florida does that big time whenever a really big rain storm or hurricane start inching closer even if the storm is way out in the mid atlantics...
 
Well, you all haven't seen anything until u live in NC.

We have the Live Doppler 5000. We get hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, blizzards, droughts, hot temps in summer, freezing temps in the winter..u know..the works....now..imagine that happening year round with warnings, watches,,,everything...& now we're all so used to hearing that in NC that when they say we're going to have an ice storm some times we don't care..when they do predict something to happen it doesnt happen but when the weathermen are not expecting anything to happen with a full day of sun & temps in the 60s then we get a blizzard...u know what i mean..
 
To get a really good idea of what the weather-casters in Florida are like during bad weather, read Dave Barry's novel, "Tricky Business" ... it is an absolutely hilarious book, but one of the funniest parts is this running sub-plot about news reporting on a tropical storm coming through town while all the other events in the book are taking place.

Shameless Dave plug, I know ... but Barry is one of my favorite authors of all time ... his fiction and non-fiction both are an absolute riot.

FL270
 
This thread reminds me of a comedy act I saw on tc one time. They were pretending to be news channel 4, with chopper of course...
Chopper 4, twice as good as chopper 2
Chopper 4, now wiht seats, camera, and microphone
Chopper 4, first on the scene when chopper 4 crashed.

Ok, so it is way funnier seeing the guys do it with their fake news smile and pretend excited news voices.
 
The ones that crack me up are the news stations that come up with some kind of catchy name for the impending doom of a storm... "Death by Snowstorm 2004"!! Return of the Living Rain Shower 2004!!! Ice Pellets from Hell 2004!!!
 
Oh, God. You should see it in DC when it snows. They put this overly melodramatic guy by a supermarket and then he talks about how people are stocking up on needs. They then cut to some overly paranoid guy who has stocked up on enough water, milk, toilet paper, and canned food to survive if there was a nuclear blast.

When it does start to snow, they cut to the same guy at an intersection, and the guy will say something like, the snow is coming down now. It's sticking to the road.

Gee, ya think? Hello, guys, it only snows here every single winter!
 
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