Meteorologists race to close what they call the nomenclature-urgency gap before landfall.
Tropical Storm Lala nears Hawaii and may become just the third recorded hurricane to make landfall there. An emergency panel of naming scientists warns the storm's name lacks menace. Their proposed fix, 'Lala: The Reckoning,' has not caught on.
An emergency panel of meteorologists met for eleven hours Friday. Their finding: no human being in recorded history has fled in terror from anything called Lala.
The timing is inconvenient. Tropical Storm Lala is nearing Hawaii and is expected to strengthen into a hurricane. Direct hits on the islands are rare. If Lala makes landfall as a hurricane, it would be only the third on record to do so.
Hence the panic at the Institute for Applied Storm Gravitas, a body that studies whether storm names sound scary enough to make people board up windows.
"We have a Category 3 threat wearing a Category 0 name," said Dr. Hollis Barometer, the institute's director of menace. "Lala is what you name a golden retriever. Lala is a backup singer. Residents hear it and reach for a beach towel, not plywood."
The institute calls this the nomenclature-urgency gap. Its models suggest evacuation compliance rises sharply when a storm's name contains at least one hard consonant and, ideally, an umlaut.
"We asked focus groups to rank Lala against other threats. It placed below 'mild draught' and just above 'decorative gourd.'"
Barometer's team proposed an emergency rebrand. Options included appending a subtitle, yielding "Lala: The Reckoning," and simply doubling the name to "Lalalala," which testing showed made things considerably worse.
The storm declined to comment
Actual forecasters, reached by ABC News and Al Jazeera, continue tracking the storm the normal way. They note that wind does not read its own press.
The institute is undeterred. It has petitioned to retire the entire alphabet of soft names and replace them with a list beginning at "Grendel" and ending, ominously, at "Todd."
The panel adjourned without agreement at 3 a.m. The storm, unnamed by its own preference, continued west at a steady pace, entirely indifferent to branding.
The implications are, frankly, terrifying (see footnote 7).
Footnotes.
