PASADENA, Calif. – The Weather Channel launches the series “It Could Happen Tomorrow,” which takes meteorological disasters from history and transplants them to the present day, Sunday at 9:30 p.m. EST.
The opening broadcast imagines a hurricane hitting New York City, and is based on the 1938 hurricane that hit Long Island. The winds, predict the experts, would “transform Times Square into a war zone.”
Other episodes are no less upsetting: a previously produced episode, on a hurricane hitting New Orleans, proved so prescient, the Weather Channel has shelved it indefinitely.
The episode was produced in April 2005 – months before Katrina roared through the Gulf – as a pilot and tested with focus groups in May, earning the series a green light in June. Then came Katrina, and, according to Weather Channel senior vice president and general manager Terry Connelly, there went the Katrina-like “It Could Happen Tomorrow” installment.
“Right now,” Connelly said Wednesday, after showing a few minutes from both the New Orleans and New York programs, “we’re not planning to air the New Orleans episode. Quite frankly, we just think it might look opportunistic.
“There may be a way – we’ve discussed it internally – of airing that episode with a lot of discussion around it,” he added. “By getting them to talk about now, in the post-Katrina era. But it was eerie just to have done that episode eight months ago (before) Katrina, and it happened.”
Asked what he thought was the most disturbing part of the New Orleans show, he singled out the warnings by Jefferson Parish and FEMA officials about the inadequate means for evacuation.
“They all talked about the evacuation,” he said, “and almost all these emergency-management people say no city is prepared with a good enough evacuation plan.”
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