Of course, most of these worrying predictions did not come to pass. There was still some incredibly shitty weather, parts of the rain-soaked Bay of Plenty got another battering on Thursday night and some homes in Waikato were evacuated on Sunday after the local river burst its banks, but most of the country avoided the worst of it.
Naturally, it didn't take long for a plethora of brain-dead munters to blame the news media for over-reacting and hyping up the event, and for making a big deal out of nothing.
But what the fuck were the papers, websites, TV shows and radio bulletins supposed to do? Ignore the apocalyptic warnings coming from weather experts altogether? Should they have waited until there were bodies floating down Queen Street before saying anything? This kind of thinking isn't just fucking stupid, it's fucking dangerous.
After all, all news organisations have a duty to warn of potential danger, as much as report on what has happened. And if the goddamn experts are saying it's going to be bad, people need to know. If a butterfly in Dubai flapped its wings a different way, the notoriously fickle weather could have shifted slightly to the right, and there would have been cars blown off the Auckland bridge - this was worth warning people about.
Those weather experts, quite rightly, needed to be prepared for a worst case scenario. Because one day it will bloody happen, and there will be horrific carnage, and if anybody feels like they weren't duly warned, there will be justifiable hell to pay. We prepare for these things in case all the shit in the world hits a big fan, because to do otherwise would be criminally negligent.
It's also worth noting that for all the big news websites, the stories about the possible dangers led to a big spike in reader numbers, indicating that A) people actually did have a desire to know what the fuck was going on, and B) online editors were doing their fucking job, and to downplay any risks - or ignore the warnings entirely- would be a move that was both reckless and incompetent.
So all those who were weirdly disappointed that there wasn't human suffering and tragedy can shove that disappointment up their arse, while the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief. Yeah, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, so thank fuck for that.
This kind of dumb-arse thinking that only comes with hindsight is nothing new. It's behind the ongoing sneering about the Y2K bug - 17 years after the dawn of the new millennium, there are still shitheads moaning about the media over-reaction. But this totally ignores the fact that it took years of concern for tech-heads to actually do something about the problem, and if it hadn't been so incessantly highlighted, it would have been a massive fucking problem. No, there weren't planes falling out of the sky on January 1, 2000, but that was the result of years and years of effort, and the media spotlight on the issue helped avert the worst of the problem.
These legends of hindsight looked out the window on Thursday night and didn't see an almighty tempest rumbling towards them, so it's all the fucking media's fault (ignoring the huge winds and rains recorded in other areas). But the media is, quite rightly, going to ignore the shit out of them, and will continue to pump out warnings and advice. To do otherwise would just be fucking stupid.
- Ron Troupe
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