Anderson Cooper, hurricanes

A brief post before I go to sleep tonight... as you may know, tonight is the night that hurricane Milton (as discussed in the previous post) is striking Florida. I was watching CNN this afternoon and evening. As of last night, Anderson was still in the studio and I was thinking maybe he would just stay in New York while other reporters went to Florida to cover the hurricane on location. This evening, I saw on TV that he was in Florida; Bradenton to be specific (a city on the south side of Tampa Bay). 

I don't think I've necessarily written much about Anderson on this blog before, though be assured he certainly holds a special place in my mind. I've liked him for quite some time, really. I think he is cool and interesting, I admire him, etc. I would probably describe him as a significant factor in my interest of being a journalist. Just to get the backstory about my general thoughts on Anderson out of the way. It would be cool to meet him someday but that has not happened for me yet. 

Anyways, I happened to be scrolling through Twitter for hurricane updates and whatever else comes through on my timeline these days, and I saw that someone had retweeted the following tweet: 

"Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment, say suburban Short Hills N.J., on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon? Why is that same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane? -- Walker Percy" 

Briefly, a little more context about the origin of that quote. It's from the book The Message in the Bottle by the author Walker Percy who wrote novels set in the American South and found hurricanes thematically interesting. I was not previously familiar with his work, so that description is just from what I saw with some quick searching and partially skimming parts of this essay about Percy's work. 

This was a quote-tweet of another tweet from the author Joyce Carol Oates, whose tweets can be a bit... wacky, shall we say. At least that's my fleeting impression having sporadically seen mildly unhinged tweets from her. Her tweet said the following: 

"Anderson Cooper started his career decades ago as a journalist / news person without an employer; traveled to trouble spots around the world, made videos which he then sold, or tried to sell, to TV stations back home. seems sad that he is now out in a hurricane putting himself in more danger." 

It was a quote-tweet of another tweet showing a brief video clip of Anderson while broadcasting live during the hurricane as he gets hit by some flying debris. At one point during the evening while I was watching him. he said that a lot of the debris consisted of palm leaves and styrofoam, which he was unclear about where all the styrofoam was coming from. [maybe it was coming from some debris pile of wreckage and garbage from Helene?] 

As an aside, Oates' description of the very beginnings of Anderson's news career is more or less accurate. Read Dispatches from the Edge, Anderson's first memoir, for more detail on this. Somewhat later into his career, once he was on CNN, he gained acclaim for his coverage of Katrina. He describes covering Katrina in that book too.  

There were some amusing replies to Joyce Carol Oates' tweet, which I'll transcribe for you here, and also for me so I can easily refer back to them in the future if I feel like it. 

"He's there because he wants to be. It's a point of pride for tv anchors to do such things. Get out from behind the desk. He's always covered both storms and wars. A real reporter, a hunting dog, not a show dog, despite those gorgeous blue eyes." 

That tweet reminded me of something I saw at some point, not when it originally aired, but some years later after I became interested in Anderson. It's from a skit on Saturday Night Live and I think they have Seth Meyers playing Anderson, and he says "see the news reflected in the shimmering blue pools that are my eyes." Coincidentally, this also happened to be an episode that Peter Sarsgaard hosted (!), so I think I may have watched it much later after I became interested in Peter Sarsgaard. 

Back to the amusing tweets... it is interesting to see others' impressions of Anderson. 

• At least he's getting paid for it. Some people do stuff like that for free.
• Maybe he wants to feel actually alive again. [I can't tell whether this is supposed to be a dig at Anderson or not...]
• There are not many people who I think care about others but I believe he does.
• i wish anderson was this brave when it comes to interviews with republicans...sadly, he's NOT...
• Postmodern Ernest Shackleton [from Wikipedia: "Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton CVO OBE FRGS FRSGS was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration." He lived during the late 1800s to the early 1900s.]
• he always works to prove himself because he's a Vanderbilt [there were multiple tweets mentioning his wealthy ancestry and how he is technically a nepo baby]  

*I know proper AP style is to put titles inside quotation marks, e.g. "Fahrenheit 451" but I kind of find italicizing them to be more aesthetically appealing. Anyways, this blog does not necessarily hew to any particular editorial standards other than "I find this topic interesting and want to make a post about it, or I want to write a review of something."  

AP style also instructs referring to people by surname on subsequent reference, but again, this is my random personal blog and I prefer to refer to Anderson by his first name. 

Hurricane Milton

This is a little bit of a sequel to my post from earlier in this year about the book Five Days at Memorial. That book detailed the harrowing events in the five days after Hurricane Katrina at one New Orleans hospital where patients and doctors were stranded by the storm and floodwaters. 

As readers may know (well, if my blog actually had any readers...), Hurricane Milton is approaching Florida in the Gulf of Mexico as I write. It is forecast to make landfall in the middle of the night on Wednesday (tomorrow) into Thursday and is currently rated a Category 5.  

This is an extremely severe, strong hurricane that's going to do a lot of damage. As I await the arrival of the storm (from multiple states away, well north and out of its path), I have a certain morbid fascination about what will happen with this hurricane. I just know that things are on the precipice of something major with this hurricane. On a trivial note, I also think the name Milton is interesting, and most likely it will be retired from the list after this storm hits.  

I was in elementary school and too young at the time to be completely aware of all the details and metaphorical weight of what happened with Katrina, so my memories of that are more simplistic. I remember watching the nightly news about it and being aware that it was a significant thing that had happened. I also think I found it somewhat interesting, in that it was something different and unusual (to see/hear about on the news), and it caused me to wish something "interesting" would happen...  

So now, with full adult awareness of this, it lends an interesting mood. I think this will be like the Katrina of the 2020s. It is a little strange to me to think that I could be on the brink of observing (indirectly) the Katrina of the 2020s. It's also kind of strange to think about how Katrina was almost 20 years ago by now. Damn, I'm getting old. I heard Coldplay's song 'Paradise' in McDonald's last week and I said "I remember when this album came out," which is a thing that people say when they're Old. That album was Mylo Xyloto and it was released in 2012 [actually late 2011], if I recall correctly. 'Paradise' was on the radio a lot back then. The album artwork was this bright blue graffiti design. I digress.

This hurricane also could potentially result in another 'Five Days at Memorial' scenario occurring somewhere in Florida in the hardest-hit area(s), so I wonder if that will happen. While we're on this topic, I do think it could be fascinating to have a career in emergency management, since I'm a meticulous, resourceful, logistical planning person and like figuring out what the best way to do something is.  

On TV, the news is showing a chyron with current hurricane status information, like the category and position of it. As of this evening, it was saying it was a couple hundred miles away from a place called Dry Tortugas. This name sounded interesting to me and I wanted to know what/where exactly this was. It is a tiny cluster of islands off the tip of Florida, west of Key West. It is also a national park. 

I was looking at Associated Press photos from the prelude and preparation period for this hurricane. Some show massive debris piles from a recent previous hurricane, others show people trying to make preparations and/or evacuate. Seeing the preparations gives me a foreboding feeling because I think about how the preparations may pale in the wake of the storm's impact and things will just get destroyed anyways. It's a very strange feeling to see the photos and know that a bunch of things will be severely damaged and destroyed in just a day from now. 

The level of destruction will probably be apocalyptic. Some portion of what I see in the photos from today will be destroyed by the hurricane and will look very different by the end of the week. The photos depict things like people boarding up windows, trying to clean up debris, empty shelves at stores for items like bottled water and food, gas stations that ran out of gas, and heavy traffic from people trying to evacuate. 

There is a photo showing a man carrying his friend's cat in a cage to evacuate it [AP photo ID 24282650725969]. This photo was from an island outside of Bradenton (slightly south of Tampa). Last week, I saw a video showing a group of people sitting (?) in a flooded living room somewhere after hurricane Helene. Among the people is a cat sitting on a floating sofa cushion. There was also a dog sitting on another floating cushion.    

So all in all there's an intriguing-foreboding feeling for me. It's sunny and clear this week here, which is an interesting contrast to the meteorological horror that awaits Florida tomorrow. In a way, it's as if I'm watching things in a snow globe. 

Society's normal functioning will break down in the areas that get demolished by the hurricane. It's strange to think about. A lot of human-nature-y things will be laid bare in ways that don't typically happen during regular everyday life. People's will (or lack thereof?) to survive, and the anguish of experiencing something like that firsthand. How does that affect someone on the individual level? How does it affect the country at large on a broader level?

And of course people will die, perhaps quite brutally. The potential for a Five Days at Memorial situation to happen again. There are a lot of facets here that I find rather intriguing/morbidly fascinating from a sociological, anthropological, psychological, even media analysis lens. Especially since I'm now able to be fully aware of the gravity and complexities here in a way I wasn't back in 2005. 

For another little digression, I've thought about and discussed recently the concept of historical awareness, let's say. One's perception and conceptualization of events. "Living memory." 9/11 as a "real" thing in my mind, even though I was too young to remember it actually happening. To a 16 year old today, it's not a real thing to them. It's more of an abstract notion, if that. Katrina isn't a "real" thing to a 16 year old today either. This tangent is pretty meta.          

Also thinking about hurricane Milton in general makes me wonder what I would do if I were in a scenario like this. I live in an area that's blissfully not prone to natural disasters, so I've never had to seriously think about emergency preparedness. Earlier this summer there was a serious tornado scare, but even then, that's just a matter of sheltering in the basement. 

In a hurricane, I suppose I would try to evacuate if possible, if I lived in a mandatory evacuation zone. If I lived in an area without mandatory evacuation orders and/or was unable to evacuate, I guess I'd have to do the best I could at surviving in place and preparing for the immediate aftermath. Stockpile food, clean water, other necessary supplies... 

How things would go in the immediate aftermath, assuming I survived, would depend on whether my home is severely damaged/flooded by the hurricane. If the only place I could evacuate to was a government-run shelter, what would I do in that case? There would only be so much that I could bring with me -- what would it be? I find it all interesting to think about in a theoretical sense. 

As usual, but especially so now, I'm going to be keeping an eye on the news because I want to see what happens. I wonder what Anderson Cooper is thinking about this, as he covered Katrina on location back then. I wonder if he's seeing the (probable) parallels too.