Carolinians Accuse Vermonters of “Hurricane Privilege”

RALEIGH – Residents of both North and South Carolina have been accusing Vermonters of having “Hurricane Privilege” this week after people in the Green Mountain State began posting online that the hurricane “wasn’t as bad” as southerners made it seem. The remnants of Hurricane Florence are passing through Vermont currently, and many Vermonters feel that people down south ought to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and deal with “a little wind and rain.”

“Your hurricane finally got here,” said one person online, tweeting under the name ‘BootstrapBill6969,’ “and I got to say, if this is what you were freaking out about y’all are a bunch of p*****s.” These sentiments were expressed by other tweeters, many of whom posted videos of themselves out in the storm laughing about whether or not they should evacuate. Several people also pointed out how large the storm looked over Vermont on the map, compared to small size in the Carolinas.

But Carolinians are hitting back, saying that Vermonters, due simply to the fact that they were born further north, are not experiencing the full fury of the storm and are having to deal with a much lighter weather situation.

“I’m not saying they aren’t getting the storm,” said the town manager of Spring Lake, NC, “I’m just saying that they storm they are getting is not the storm we are getting. We all get storms, but for some people it’s worse. The winds are higher, the rains are heavier, and the flooding that comes as a result is vastly different.”

Studies have shown that the areas in which hurricanes make landfall are more likely to have higher levels of devastation, although not everyone is convinced.

“You really can’t prove causation,” said UVM Professor Libby Aleet. “It’s true that we see higher death counts near landfall, but it may be that the people who live in those areas are just stupider and worse at making good decisions. I don’t think anyone has ever confirmed conclusively that the winds from the hurricane in Vermont are lower than the winds in North Carolina. It may be that their houses just aren’t built well. I’m not trying to blame the victims at all, I’m just trying to say that it may not entirely be not their fault.”

Many studies, using devices ranging from the latest weather measuring technology to wind socks, have indeed proven conclusively that the winds in Vermont were significantly lower than the winds in North Carolina.

“You can say that,” Aleet replied, “but unless you are using exactly the same instruments in the same place at the same time, I think we can agree there is a significant margin of error in these results. I can’t see any real evidence that the people here had a weaker storm than the people in the Carolinas.”

Further evidence was provided by Vermonters that people in the south are just bad at dealing with weather, when several people posted video clips of cities shutting down in the south over just a few inches of snow.