[Porsche-O-Phile]

What bothers me (even moreso than TWC's inane naming of "nothing" storms just to add to the sensationalism of them - making them sound like hurricanes or named tropical storms a la National Weather Service's convention for such things) is the fact that so many entities DID respond to this one ahead of time. They took it seriously, called people up, had equipment where it should be, etc.

The problem is when the bean-counters find out what it all cost to put those assets in place and make all those preparations. They'll wring their hands and scream about how expensive the preparations were only to have been "wasted" on a storm that didn't really live up to expectations. They'll wail about it and as such the outcome is predictable - the response to the next one, the one after that and the one after that will diminish and until we get to a point where we set ourselves up for failure and get one that really IS a big deal and end up caught with our pants down, under-prepared and under-resourced. That's when people get hurt and when people die. All because of hand-wringing ninny bean-counters and the politicians that are stupid enough to employ and listen to them. No politician has the balls to stand up to someone accusing them of overspending in this day / age.

It's all so predictable. It'll happen.

I expect in a year or two when responses / preparations to events like this have been scaled back as a result of second-guessing / Monday morning quarterbacking from the misers is when it'll happen - a big storm will come in and there really will be rampant power outages and such. Hopefully I'll be long gone from this region of the country by then, but I feel for the folks that are going to get caught in this predictable cycle of budget-obsessed micromanagement and stupidity, chronic "knee-jerk" reactionary management and the incapability of leaders to actually lead and say "if it costs, it costs - lives are more important, better to over-prepare than under-prepare". I want to see efficiency and better spending management from government too, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. We're setting ourselves up to do it exactly the wrong way. Utility companies will do the same thing - I can hear some power company middle manager now asking "why did we spend so much on tree-trimming and infrastructure last year only to not end up needing it? We had great service and minimal disruption. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars calling up reserve crews that were never needed - we could have saved that money!"

You all know what's going to happen here.