Whenever a hurricane is remotely seen in the Atlantic Ocean moving westward, you can guarantee the alarms will sound from the local and national news and there will be nonstop coverage from hour-to-hour.

Tropical Storm Ernesto, which is approaching my house as we speak and I can feel it's winds out of my window (don't worry....you sneeze harder than those winds will blow) has been covered every second since Wednesday.  CNN has their meterologists on it, so does Fox.  Hell; even Sean Hannity dragged Accuweather's Joe Bastardi onto his radio show just to talk about it.  One of our local news stations in the Triangle, WRAL, used up two extra hours of news - going from their normal 5-7 to 5-9pm - to provide extra coverage of a storm that barely made top wind speeds of 70mph.

Maybe that's exciting news to people that live inland, or further up the eastern seaboard, as they rarely get to experience full hurricane winds, but it's nothing to those that have experience the brunt of real storms.  Diana, Gloria, Charlie, Floyd, Dennis, Fran, Bertha...I've seen them all.  This one?  It's nothing.

As a kid, I used to love watching the local weather and see this large storm approaching the Outer Banks.  Considering where I lived, there really wasn't much to look forward to.  I would liken it to midwesterners in Kansas or Missouri being amazed by tornadoes and eventually become storm chasers. 

I remember, over 10 years ago...this LARGE hurricane approached the Outer Banks, and got up to 100 or so miles off of the coast of NC, and SAT there for two days.  They evacuated the whole coast of NC, because the National Weather Service expected a "direct hit", which meant the hurricane was going to slam into North Carolina through Cape Hatteras, the easternmost point in NC.  However, it finally rolled out and back into the Atlantic, slapping Bermuda again for good measure.

UPDATE:  I found the hurricane.  It was Felix in 1995.   Wow. 

Events like that, I'll never forget.  However, anytime a storm even thinks about approaching the U.S., we can expect the news to blow it out of proportion or hope the hurricane would just disintegrate in the ocean (and they have done that before) just so the media will stop talking about it.  I'd rather go back to my smaller, coastal local stations that I grew up with as a kid (particularly Skip Waters of WCTI 12), rather than these ridiculous 5 day coverages done by the networks and news wires that ridiculously hype up storms that anyone with a bit of common sense knows have no chance of doing significant damage.