Hey, that was some sight on Rio Grande Valley expressways, the line of school buses from all over Texas heading home after the latest hurricane scare veered once again to Mexico.

Chisme happened to be heading north on Expressway 281 in Pharr on Tuesday when up ahead there appeared a long cola of yellow buses. Chisme, not being very bright, looked at his watch for the date of the month. What, has school started? No, tonto, it’s the buses that came south to pick up Valley people who wanted to head out of Dodge if the storm came this way.

Chisme counted over 50 buses just in that stretch, and they were from all over - San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, all empty going north after the hurricance honchos said for sure that Dean, (what kind of name is that for a hurricane?), would cross the Yucatan, and then make for between Tampico and Veracruz.

Y’all will remember all of the fuss over the school bus fiasco over Hurricane Katrina, the storm that changed everything when it comes to government officials panicking over hurricanes. The buses left New Orleans with no one on `em, or was it that the buses never got there? I forget. But it looked really bad, and the last thing a governor, county judge, or mayor wants in these days of hurricane planning is to look like an incompetent Brownie.

So, that’s why when Dean was like 2,000 miles away, on the other side of the Yucatan no less, Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos was advising everyone to get out of Dodge. Only problem is that by Saturday evening all the hurricane models, including the mero-mero from the National Hurricane Center, had Dean-o making landfall hundreds of miles south of Brownsville. It was a no doubter by that point.

The precision of the predicted paths of hurricanes is now so reliable that a three-day projected track from the hurricane center is just about gold, give or take a few dozen miles. So, really, Cascos’ call was quite off the mark, but understandable. Don’t want to look like Brownie.

It must have cost the state of Texas a mint to send that armada of buses down this way. State and local officials fell all over themselves congratulating their fellow officialdom for such massively good planning for a storm that ended up over 500 miles from here. Is that what we’ll see from here on out? A storm is 1,500 miles out, so better fire up the school buses, just in case, you never know.

Here’s a last bit of hurricane advice: Don’t bother with the TV people, local or the Weather Channel. No dicen nada, or they just repeat what the hurricane center is putting out. The Weather Channel is especially useless. The later is especially afraid of being wrong on anything, so they play it totally safe, putting a big “cone of possibilities” where a hurricane can hit, like they did with Dean, saying it could hit anywhere from Corpus to Tampico. That was a big help.

It’s much better to go to the National Hurricane Center website and/or a site called Weather Underground that runs all of the major models on where a storm is likely to go. Oh well, if one comes this way, we know we’ve got plenty of bus seats to choose from.

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