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Reverse 911September 04, 2010 Bright early fall air is blowing through my apartment. The curtains on the west side are billowing, the shade on the east is swaying. When it started to rain last night I closed everything up -- serious rain comes in through all open windows and skylights, no matter what direction it's coming from. Yesterday's heavy air was still in residence when I woke up this morning. Now it's gone gone gone. Hurricane Earl didn't live up to its advance billing. Partly this is because it was steadily fading the closer it got. Mostly it's because the advance billing was, to put it mildly, overblown. "Earl brought wind, rain and not much else" says the update headline on the M.V. Times website. I'd add "an adrenaline rush for island officials and quite a few residents." Automated calls to more than 20,000 phones -- yesterday I learned that these are called "Reverse 911 calls." You call 911 to report an emergency to authorities that can help deal with it. With Reverse 911, the authorities call you to report that there might be an emergency in the future. What's the difference between Reverse 911 and crying "Wolf"? Interesting question. The boy who cried "Wolf!" was a kid. The people playing Reverse 911 are not kids. They are adults in positions of responsibility and authority. The boy who cried "Wolf!" was, I suspect, bored. Nothing ever happened in his village. The adults never got excited about anything without compelling reason, and compelling reasons were hard to come by. One of the few was the threat of Wolf. Hence the boy cried "Wolf!" Not "Chicken!" or "Mama!" In other times and places adults -- men, in nearly every instance -- have got considerable mileage out of crying "Witch!" or "Commie!" but the boy who cried "Wolf!" wasn't sophisticated or well-connected enough to be taken seriously so he was hung out to dry -- which is to say he became a parable to teach children that it is very bad policy to scare the adults without very good cause. These Reverse 911 people think they have very good cause and (unlike the boy) they get to decide what a good cause is. They think they are conveying crucial information. Crucial information like businesses should close at 2 p.m. and stay closed for 24 hours -- before anyone knew what shape Earl would be in when it started affecting our weather. They were taking refuge in "profiling," in other words. Earl had "Hurricane" in his name, just like Katrina had "Hurricane" in her name -- therefore we might have Apocalypse Incoming. A neighbor and I were talking about the hysterical reaction of some people. "Maybe they remember Hurricane Bob," she said. Aha. "Maybe they don't," I said. I remember Hurricane Bob. He arrived in the middle of August 1991. We hadn't had a really big blow on Martha's Vineyard in decades. Big trees went down, and in some parts of the island the landscape was totally transformed. I was living down a dirt road near the West Tisbury–Chilmark line. Several very big trees fell across that road. A woman living on that road was a nurse at M.V. Hospital, and it was on her account that volunteers -- firefighters, EMTs, and others -- showed up with chain saws and cleared the road. The rest of us, non-essential though we were, had access to State Road much sooner than we would have if one of our neighbors hadn't been a nurse. Electricity, however, was another matter. Our electricity wasn't restored till nine days after the storm blew through. Yeah, it was an inconvenience, but you know what? We managed. We got drinking water from a hose at the West Tisbury fire station. We took showers at friends' houses. I washed my hair in the sink at work. A few years later, Hurricane Edouard blew through on Labor Day weekend. I was working at Webb's campground that summer, 1996. If you're living in a tent, or even an RV, heavy rainfall has a significance that it doesn't have for people in more secure dwellings. My co-workers and I informed campers that shelter was available at the Oak Bluffs School, and quite a few of them took advantage of it. The short version is that because I've weathered a few storms here, I have confidence that emergency services will be provided and that whatever happens -- barring the worst of worst-case scenarios -- we will make do, help each other out, and get by. With Earl on the way, in other words, there was no need to panic. No need for the excesses of this Reverse 911. Preparation is good. We're pretty well prepared; most of us know the drill. This Reverse 911 is not so good. It reminds me of the big demonstrations of my younger days, when savvy organizers knew that there were some people who could not under any circumstances be trusted with bullhorns. Put a bullhorn in their hands and they immediately lost the ability to SHUT UP. Pretty soon they'd infect everyone in the immediate vicinity with their nervousness and their misinformation. Same with Reverse 911. The nervous got more nervous. And those of us who were pretty sure that we could survive whatever Earl threw at us heard "Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!" and went about our business.
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