Maybe no tropical problems, for now

 Maybe, just maybe, we have missed the three Atlantic-Gulf tropical systems that have been stirring around out there.

 Hurricane season over the past four years has taught me to never feel relieved about missing a hurricane or tropical system that could turn into a hurricane until it is gone and can’t jump back out into the ocean, re-form and strike once more.

 Weather forecasters had put Rita’s landfall in September 2005 at several places on the southern Texas coast including the area around Corpus Christi which is almost Mexico. (I’m sure Corpus Christians would be glad to hear that!) Instead Rita made landfall around Johnson’s Bayou, La., just east of the Texas border. It ended up wreaking havoc more than 100 miles inland.

 Something similar happened with Ike last year and Humberto in 2007 sneaked up on us kind of like the Tropical Storm Claudette did to Florida this morning.

 Here on the uppermost Texas coast we are supposedly under the influence of a tropical wave that allegedly was to bring us rain but I’ve yet to see anything more than a couple of drops.

 I know the local TV weather gods can’t be told anything but I wish someone with some clout — like their bosses — would tell them to stow their air of certainty when it comes to forecasting hurricanes. I have seen some weather geeks, probably not meteorologists, who take the three- and five-day cones the National Hurricane Center issues as the last word on storm tracks. Hey dips**t, it’s a cone, that means the hurricane models show the storm can end up anywhere within that cone, north or south. The storm might not even stay inside the cone.

 Even if I was the smartest man, weatherman, on Earth I would not say “we have nothing to worry about” until we truly have nothing to worry about.  I mean, what if some people were actually stupid enough to believe what the weather man says and he ends up getting caught flat-footed with the water “six feet high and rising?”