Hanna is getting ready to hit the Carolinas late tonight / early Saturday morning. Like most every person who lives in “Hurricane Alley” (the area of the Carolina coast between Charleston, S.C., and Hatteras, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina), I have my batteries, water, ropes, tarps, portable radio, bread, gas in the truck, flashlights and duct tape ready if needed.

This hurricane is a weather phenomenon. It was not caused by nor sent to the Carolinas as a wrathful punishment because I spoke out against the Lakeland Revival (someone will probably state this to me via private e-mail or the contact form).

Also, it was not caused by (according to this guy) slavery.

Yesterday, I went and looked around the major weather sites to see their coverage to analyze their coverage. I noticed something interesting.

I could not find a downloadable printout hurricane map that one could plot their own coordinates at The Weather Channel, Accuweather, or Intellicast. But I found a good one here (.pdf file) and also here (.pdf file)

I also did a test to see how quick the Internet sites would post the latest coordinates and they were within reason for quickly updating (remember to dump your browser cache). The National Hurricane Center was the first to post online five minutes before the time of the coordinate and also the easiest to access information. The Weather Channel was the easiest to understand the information in layman’s terms.

However, the one thing that I was very disappointed in in reference to the modern age of instant technology was that it took my local NOAA weather radio station fifteen minutes after the top of the hour of a posted coordinate to finally broadcast the latest coordinates. One of the things you are told to do in hurricane preparation is to procure a battery powered radio preferrably with the wx band and listen to the radio for the latest information. If the National Hurricane Center can post it on their webpage five minutes before the post time of a coordinate, why can’t the local NOAA radio get it a whole lot closer to the post time of a coordinate?

What is going to be very interesting will be in the HDTV age is will they make HDTV radios or will someone make a battery powered HDTV to analog converter box to connect to a old tv radio (channel 3 or 4) in order to listen to the local HDTV television stations when the power is out?