ISSUE: Hurricane forecasts

OUR VIEW: Erratic storm will lead to more forecast questions

Tropical Storm Fay has heaped plenty of misery on Florida, not in the form of major damage from wind and rising water, but from massive amounts of rain.

The erratic storm -- just the fourth ever to hit Florida three separate times -- has seemed to change track by the hour. It’s not through yet. Fay is expected to cause flooding problems along the coast of Georgia and even into South Carolina.

But it appears a safe bet now that Fay will never reach the level of a storm that poses a hurricane-type threat to any area of the United States.

That will mean a new round of protests about the accuracy of predicting where storms will hit.

Most times, the complaints come from people who evacuate when it appears a certain location is in the bull’s eye. While they are happy when the storm takes a different course, they are not happy about having prepared so extensively and even evacuated in many instances.

While the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi should serve to make people aware of the importance of warnings and getting them in time to take action, there remains unhappiness about the practice of forecasting the paths of hurricanes five days ahead.

The National Weather Service in recent years extended its hurricane predictions from three days to five, mainly at the request of the Navy and large petrochemical companies with offshore drilling operations. The added time can allow warships time to leave port for the relative safety of open water and give refineries time to shut down.

South Carolina has felt the economic impact of hurricane warnings several times, with tourists fleeing before storms initially bound for our coastline ultimately made landfall in North Carolina.

It is in the coastal areas of that state where local government officials, restaurant and hotel owners and others say predicting possible landfall five days out will be inaccurate because forecasts will include huge areas of coastline, for example, from the tip of Florida to the Carolinas.

The forecasts will needlessly scare away tourists, they say. The three-day predictions give more than enough warning, they contend.

Not necessarily. All one has to do is remember traffic jams in South Carolina with people trying to flee our coast. Increasing the amount of warning time is worthwhile, particularly if, as the National Weather Service says, the five-day forecasts now are as accurate as three-day predictions were 15 years ago. Improved technology is cited.

People need time to flee nature’s biggest storms. Where science can help save lives and protect property and assets, failing to put it to use would be a tragedy and travesty.

And in the case of Fay, let it not be forgotten that before its misadventures in the States, the storm killed at least 20 people in the Caribbean.

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